Liberating Yourself From Lyme Disease – Ep#066 The Healing Powers of Love and Intuition With Vir McCoy

0 (1s):
Welcome to the Soul Science Nutrition Podcast, where you’ll discover that when it comes to your health, you’re so much more powerful than you’ve been led to believe. And now your host, she’s a holistic nutrition and lifestyle coach, chef author, and Yogi, Christine Okezie.

Christine Okezie (22s):
Hello, hello, and welcome to the Soul Science Nutrition Podcast. I’m Christine Okezie. Thanks so much for listening. A holistic approach to health embraces all our experiences as potential catalysts to learn, grow, and evolve above all. It recognizes that the body has an innate desire to heal. And our job essentially is to commit, to finding ways to access that deep healing wisdom. This begins of making a conscious decision to go within and connect with the life force intelligence that lies at the center of the body-mind system. When it comes to our suffering and difficulty, there’s an invitation to go into it, through it, to get the medicine.

Christine Okezie (1m 9s):
This requires that we develop our sensory awareness skills and learn to ask our bodies from a place of love and compassion would a truly needs to heal using both our intuition and our intellect. We can best avoid giving away all our faith and power to those external sources and seek out the knowledge, expertise, and support that law lines with what we know to be true in our own heart. Well today’s special guest is a beautiful example of this soul centered journey of healing. He is veer McCoy, teacher, body work, healer, ecologist, and author of the incredible book,”Liberating Yourself From Lyme, An Integrative and Intuitive Guide to Healing, Lyme Disease.

Christine Okezie (1m 58s):
Vir shares his 10 year journey healing from chronic Lyme disease with a medical intuitive approach that bridges the scientific and the spiritual. We talk about the energetic and psychological strategies that he successfully employed and how he was able to discover a wide array of natural remedies by increasing his sensitivity to his body’s messages, backing up his intuitive impressions with scientific evidence. Vere’s book is definitely hands down, one of the most comprehensive and actionable guides for anyone struggling with Lyme disease, but it’s actually equally a valuable resource for anyone seeking a deeper level of healing when it comes to chronic health challenges.

Christine Okezie (2m 44s):
I can’t wait for you to listen on this beautiful conversation. And if you like the episode, I’d appreciate if you could leave a rating and review, and if you haven’t hit that subscribe button, please do so. It helps me keep the podcast growing. Thanks so much and enjoy the episode. Hello, Vir. Welcome to the podcast it’s such a pleasure to have you on today.

Vir McCoy (3m 6s):
Thanks for having me so excited.

Christine Okezie (3m 10s):
Wow, awesome. So I would love if we could just dive in and maybe tell us, tell us when and how you were diagnosed with Lyme disease and how the struggles essentially, you know, puts you on the path to explore this incredible integrative approach.

Vir McCoy (3m 27s):
So I was diagnosed with, so in, in, I guess it was the summer of 2001, I was living in marina county, which is north of the bay area, San Francisco bay area. It’s kind of a rural area. That’s very beautiful, but I was taking a shower one night and I found a tick embedded in my, my armpit. And it looked like it had been there for awhile. And, you know, I didn’t know anything at that time about Lyme disease. You know, I was living on the west coast and I think I’ve maybe heard of it, but it just didn’t put anything together. So I pulled the tick off and kept an eye on it.

Vir McCoy (4m 9s):
And two weeks later I got a big bullseye rash on my stomach. So we know that it was things like Lyme disease that you can get a rash. Only 50%, maybe 50% of people will even get a rash. And it doesn’t have to be with a bite it’s, it’s not that initial, you know, pain where the bite is when you get the bullseye rash, that means it’s gone into your system. It’s, it’s literally, the bacteria has gone into your, your limp. And it’s a response to that. So the different kinds of rash. So I get this rash on my, my, my stomach. And I’m like, what’s this? You know, I started showing people. It’s like, it doesn’t itch.

Vir McCoy (4m 50s):
You know, I even showed my girlfriend at the time. Who’s from New York and she’s like, I don’t know. And you know, I thought maybe it’s poison Oak, but it’s an edge. Is it ringworm? I don’t know. I let it go. Okay. They went away and maybe a month really well, let’s see, probably a total of three months after the bike, I was playing music. I’m also a musician and strumming my hand and it was like, my hand would move properly. I was like move hand with a delayed reaction, move hand. Now this sort of delayed response in my nervous system.

Vir McCoy (5m 31s):
And it freaked me out. And the person I was with was like, dude, you need to go see a doctor something’s really wrong. And I was like, yeah, something is really wrong. I’ve been feeling really weird. So I went over to buddy buddy of mine’s house who happens to be a doctor. He’s a doctor of osteopathy. And so he had one of those, a a to Z Merck manual of diseases. And I literally went through from ABC, ABC. I was like a Alzheimer’s no B botulism no, C cancer no, D diaper rash, you know, F G. And I got to L and I read about Lyme. And I was like, oh my God, I put it all together.

Vir McCoy (6m 12s):
The bite, the rash, the experiences that I was having, I was like, wow, this is Lyme disease. And I went straight to the local clinic out in, in Marin county and, and ask them to test me for Lyme disease. And they were, they, at first they refused. They were like, no, there’s no such thing as Lyme disease here. We don’t test for that. Wow. Yeah. And I was like, no, you need to test me for Lyme. Like it, you know, and after a lot of persuading, yes, they tested me and it came back positive for Borrelia, which is the main bacteria implicated in Lyme disease.

Vir McCoy (6m 52s):
And they gave me a month long course of antibiotics, doxycycline, which is pretty standard. And the docs is cycling, knocked everything out, all my symptoms. And I was feeling totally normal. And I thought I was done. That was just the beginning,

Christine Okezie (7m 9s):
Indeed. Okay. What are the signs and symptoms did you eventually come to have following that initial course of antibiotics?

Vir McCoy (7m 18s):
Yeah. So over the course of Lyme disease, I had a plethora of symptoms. So after that initial course of antibiotics, it came raging back probably three or four months, maybe three months later, I got Bell’s palsy, which is a paralysis of the face. I started having more neurological issues with, with my hands and feet. I started getting arthritis in all of my joints. It was kind of a moving sort of rheumatic arthritis. So it moves. I remember distinctly going from my knees into my feet, and then it crosses the blood brain barrier. It gets into your brain. And then I started having fevers and I started having what they call brain fog and all sorts of delirium.

Vir McCoy (8m 4s):
You feel like you’re, you’re going manic. I started having dizziness. It gets into your, the lime. We can talk about the biology of it, but basically once it crosses the blood brain barrier, it likes to hide out in the ganglia of your nervous system. So the gang, the ganglia are like those control centers. They’re like the balls while the nerves come together. So you can have all these bizarre symptoms ringing in the ears, vertigo, dizziness, you know, pain, pain, soreness in the scalp, heart issues, all the, all I had, I just had a ton of these kinds of things, including thinking that I was going crazy because you get inflammation in your brain.

Vir McCoy (8m 52s):
And when you get brain inflammation, that’s where you start to get this, this confusion of thinking, you know, it starts to resemble things like Alzheimer’s, or, you know, you feel like you’re going nuts. And I knew it was Lyme disease the whole time. It was like, oh my God, because I went back to another doctor who ordered a, a spinal tap that don’t recommend those. That’s not fine, but they wanted to see if there was white blood cells, if the bacteria had gotten into the blood brain barrier. And so they, they, yes, it did. It came back that the, that I have these elevated white blood cells, that the Lyme disease had crossed the blood brain barrier.

Vir McCoy (9m 33s):
And so indeed it was. So then I went on another course of antibiotics for 40 days. I did intravenous antibiotics. I had to go to the hospital every day and get, you know, I had this thing in PICC line, they call it installed in your, your arm. You know? And once again, I started to feel better with the antibiotics that they gave me. So self trioxide. So I had a, you know, a myriad of symptoms, but the main thing is it’s like, I knew what it was and it, and I remember thinking if I didn’t know that this was Lyme disease, it could get misdiagnosed as so many different things

Christine Okezie (10m 12s):
Go down the rabbit hole in so many different directions. Right. Is it neuromuscular? Is it, you know, what kind of inflammation is? It don’t even know where to start. Cause it’s, so system wide.

Vir McCoy (10m 25s):
Exactly. It resembles like everything from multiple sclerosis to like, you know, Meniere’s syndrome, which is like a vertigo syndrome to like, you know, arthritis, rheumatoid arthritis to, you know, bipolar to, to, you know, to all sorts of crazy diagnosises that so many people who have Lyme disease get, you know, and also this is happening now with long haul, long haul or COVID as similar sort of pathway where you get all these bizarro symptoms and you could get misdiagnosed in so many ways. So yeah. But I knew what it was.

Vir McCoy (11m 6s):
So I was able to see like, wow, this is the Lyme causing this. Interesting. So in the hospital during that 40 days, something very important started to happen on an intuitive level. Yes. So

Christine Okezie (11m 26s):
You developed some incredible sort of sensitivity or sensory awareness, and it really became the, the doorway essentially, you know, to having a new relationship with the Lyme is the way that your your whole story kind of, you know, the takeaway. It was like, wow, you really changed the relationship with your body, with the Lyme, with this notion of what it takes to heal. So tell us about that sensitivity.

Vir McCoy (11m 53s):
Yeah. So, you know, as a kid, I always felt like I was a bit sensitive to things, you know, sights smells, sounds colors. I was always the kid that would hide under the table when people came over, you know, super duper shy. I’m, I’m not like that anymore. I am, in some ways I’m a musician as well. So I, you know, out in front of big, big audiences, but, but I trained as a scientist. So your listeners know I actually work as a, as a field biologist. And that is, I’m the kind of person that goes out and does rare plant surveys. So I know the names of all the plants. I know the scientific names of all the animals, you know, looking at it , an ecologist basically.

Vir McCoy (12m 36s):
So I have kind of the sciency brain. That’s very curious about the world around me, but I have this very sort of intuitive artistic soul. You know, I always say I have the brain of a scientist and the soul of an artist that happened to make for good company with this disease, because I, I was starting to understand what was going on on a scientific level. I started reading a lot about, you know, how line has this life cycle, where it actually goes into a cyst form or an egg four, and that little egg form can like dorm it for quite some time. And they’ve shown that that little egg can hatch then go dormant for years. Wow. And when it hatches, what you get is a mutation of the, of the original bug.

Vir McCoy (13m 24s):
So you’re constantly getting this cyclical nature of it, and you get what’s called persister cells, are these leaves lingering. You know, it’s basically the, the plethora of lingering cells that continue on with Lyme disease. It could be everything that from the, from their proteins that your body starts having, as you know, how’s, it reacted to these, to these SIS likes. Patients will often feel much better after a few months after all of these bacteria die off. And then the cysts will hatch and you’ll feel like crap for months. And then you’ll have to take all your pills and medicines and you’ll feel better. And then you’ll get worse and you’ll feel better. And people are like, why are you still sick?

Vir McCoy (14m 5s):
You know? So it just, it just goes on and on and on and on and off. And, and, you know, if you catch Lyme disease early enough, if you catch it before it’s able to insist or late it’s little babies, get it out of you, that’s where it’s so important to capsuline disease early. Like, you know, if you get that rash, if you get, if you get sick early on, just, you know, just take a course of antibiotics and be done with it. Like once it gets past a month and a half, you start to get in trouble. Okay. So back to this other way of healing, I’m laying in the hospital bed. And, and it felt like my brain was just not working.

Vir McCoy (14m 47s):
Everything was just, you know, I was just, I, I remember having fevers, delirious and laying in the hospital though with an ivy hooked into my arm, just out, just like I started praying, like I said, I need help. Like someone helped me, you know, when you get to that point. And I remember this feeling of like, love, you know, what happens if you love, love your brain? And I remember this feeling of like, I can still breathe and still alive, and I could still, I could still, you know, that this is this thing that nobody can take away from me. And I had this moment where I went into my brain and I held it like a little baby, the way a mother of my, you know, I just got into a really tender space.

Vir McCoy (15m 35s):
Like, I love you and love you. I love you. What’s the matter, what’s the matter? What do you need a felt sense? You know? And I just kept doing that. Like, I love you praying, like, I don’t want to die. Like, what is the matter? What do you need? What’s wrong? And in that place, in that sort of loving presence, I had this beautiful image of a tree in the woods and the forest and up the side of the tree or mushrooms. So not those kinds of grow on the ground, but the kind that grow on the side of the trees, the shelf mushrooms, the poly pores.

Vir McCoy (16m 17s):
And from my work as a biologist, I recognized one of them is as Rishi mushrooms. And the other one, I recognize this Turkey Tail And there was a third one that I didn’t know what it was. And I got out of the hospital and I looked at it and it was called Chagas. And it was like, these mushrooms are spiraling up to the sky, like in this beautiful Dr. Seuss vision or something, you know, and I had this sense of like, I need those. I think I need, you know, it was a very, came from a very intuitive, but in a loving space, you know? And so after I got out of the hospital, I started to research these mushrooms.

Vir McCoy (16m 58s):
So your listeners may know that these mushrooms are now quite common. Right. And a lot of like, like things, people are always talking about these machines, but in 2001, exactly. I didn’t know. And I mean, even though I was a biologist and I’d only heard of a few people, you know, so I looked up and read in pulse standards book, and he’s like my colleges and started reading up on what these mushrooms do. Wow. Rishi turns out it’s been used in Chinese medicine for thousands of years. It’s a natural immune booster, sort of smart and super for your immune system. Same with Turkey Tail, at that time had been used as an anti-cancer drug in the us called P S K, you know, and then Chaga, of course, it’s like the same thing.

Vir McCoy (17m 44s):
It’s like, there’s a sort of adaptogenic, very intelligent, kind of no herbs that helps smarten your immune system and boost your immune system. And then there’s been like hundreds and hundreds of studies since, since then, you know, but this was all new. This was all new to me. And so it’s on me. It was like, wow, is there a place within us that instead of looking outside of our bodies for what it is that we need to heal, is there a place within, is there a place that already knows, is there a place where we can call that in? And I started to think about this, what had happened in the hospital like this, this vision, you know, and how it happened.

Vir McCoy (18m 29s):
And at that point, I wasn’t sure, you know, this is a little bit of like, well, maybe I was just tripping cause I have like, you know, fevers and stuff. But the clincher came, the validation came for the intuitive process. When I was reading an article in National Ggeographic, and I write about this in the book and I was reading it this article in National Geographics about Otsy the Iceman, and Otsy the Iceman was this, I think like 2300 year old man that some Swiss hikers found in the Alps, in the Swiss Alps. They found this thought-out out body who had died in the snow 2300 years ago, but covered up, I sober for all that time.

Vir McCoy (19m 14s):
And they found this body particularly like starting to thought on a super warm summer. And they took this guy to some science, some scientists, and they did all these studies on him. Like, what was he eating? You know, what kind of shoes did he wear? You know, what kind of, what was he doing? How did he die? Turns out he died from an arrow wound to the heart, staggered for a while and fell in the snow and bled to death. But they also tested artsy for four diseases and one, okay. Well, the things that came up was that he tested positive for Lyme disease for Borrelia.

Vir McCoy (19m 57s):
So that means that Borrelia has been around for a long time in some form or another. I mean, there’s, you know, people get into it, maybe it was heightened in world war two and turned into a superbug, you know? And I don’t know about that, you know, but there was, so the key thing about Oxy was he had Lyme, but there was something even more important was that he had a little leather pouch, a little like medicine pouch around his waist. And guess what was in that pack? It’s mushrooms. It was some mushrooms. It was the same kinds of mushrooms. It was what we call poly pore or the shelf mushrooms.

Vir McCoy (20m 39s):
It was a Birch polypore mushroom and another mushroom, similar to Rishi and Turkey and Chagas and TurkeyTai, Chaga. So I remember dropping National Geographic, oh my God. He was either treating his line disease or like, you know, he figured it out. Or he went to a Dr.or shaman or whatever it was called at that time and was treating his Lyme disease. I was sure of it, you know, and like, but no one talked about that. Nobody put that together. But for me it was this validation of the intuitive process. Unbelievable. And so what I started to do was I started to work this intuitive process, like a muscle and what that is, is getting into a loving space.

Vir McCoy (21m 29s):
And that’s not easy to do, especially when you’re in pain or your brain is going to wire. But one of the key things, and I wrote about this in the book and there’s, there’s some exercises in the book is what is it that that’s going to get you in into a loving space? And one of the most important things to start off is to think about the things that you love. So I would ask your listeners and we can do it too. It’s like, what is it we love? What is it? We know we love that, that the unconditional, that, that feeling of like, yes, I love, you know, I love birds. I love river. I love mountains.

Vir McCoy (22m 9s):
I love, I always imagined myself as like an Eagle flying over mountains. You know, I love my mom. You know, I love my wife. I love my dog. I know I love my dog. You know, the things, you know, you love not forcing it. Like actually I don’t really love my dad, you know, that’s okay. Don’t bullshit. Bullshit. Let, let the, what, what we’re doing by thinking about the things we’re loved, we love is we’re generating the feeling of love, which is no longer a thought form, right? It’s a feeling of love. That’s what we’re looking for is that feeling of love. And you know, when push comes to shove at the very core of things is like, isn’t that why we’re here?

Vir McCoy (22m 52s):
So like learn and, and, and be loved and loved precisely what’s that old song, you know, nature boy, the greatest thing, the greatest thing that you’ll ever have. And it’s just to be loved in return. That’ll not king Cole song.

Christine Okezie (23m 10s):
It all comes back to that, right? Whether it’s the sages or like, you know, and poems and modern day now, I think we’re all. And even now, even the science supporting the physiology of love and compassion and, and the effects of, you know, the neurology and our heart and all of it. But thank you. Yes. And so going into that heart center, into that space within literally taking a different route, you know, now one of the things you talk about is you went into the pain, not only, or do you try to get curious and from that quiet space, but you, you, you talk about the process, which again, is quite radical, right?

Christine Okezie (23m 55s):
In the sense that usually we’re pushing against and pushing away, that’s our natural tendency, but you actually be friend, you actually bless the enemy. You know, I, in the lime actually go in directly into the pain and make contact with it. And, and it’s, it’s, it’s, this is courageous work. Obviously, you know, it takes, takes faith and trust and, and consistency. But how do we bless the enemy? And again, this is for folks certainly who are struggling or think they may be struggling with Lyme disease. But what I loved about your work is that for any of us who are facing any kind of physical suffering, mental, or emotional pain, your strategies are very relevant to healing.

Christine Okezie (24m 42s):
Yeah.

Vir McCoy (24m 43s):
So I’ll, I’ll, I’ll build up to that because that’s really, that became the biggest breakthrough for me in the end, after nine years from 2001 to about 2010. So to come back to that, that, that place of love. So we’ve talked about thinking about the things of love and generating that feeling of love, right? Getting into that space and in that space, going into our body and holding just like a little baby, just like I did in the hospital, those parts of the body that are in pain, those parts that are suffering, the arthritis in the knee, the confusion in the brain, maybe you’re going to hold the whole immune system.

Vir McCoy (25m 24s):
Maybe you’re gonna hold your whole body. Maybe it’s your eye. It can, you can do this with anything, but to get into a loving space and then hold that place and now, and listen and ask. What’s the matter I love you. I, you know, I love you liver. What’s the matter. And imagine that you’re holding and gently cradling that painful part of your body from that loving space. And in that space, something very special can happen using our sensory perceptions, the answers, the cues to your hearing will well up.

Vir McCoy (26m 4s):
Sometimes it’s a thought, sometimes it’s an image. Sometimes it’s a sound. Sometimes it’s a taste. Sometimes it’s a smell. Sometimes it’s a felt sense. It’s a sensory, we’re using our sensory perception. It’s like a Sherlock Holmes. Who’s going inside with love looking to see what’s what the matter is. He’s looking for the clues in the answers, but he’s being open to anything, to anything I call young in his book, man. And assembled says that spirit speaks in symbology, right?

Vir McCoy (26m 45s):
So we’re looking for the symbols, the tastes, the smells, the images, the whatevers, whatever it is that comes up, you know? So we might be holding our liver. And like, I, you know, I’ve had this happen at the image of dandy lion came up, you know, it’s like, I know that plan. It’s like, and then I went and looked up Danny line. What’s Dan like good for, oh, wow, it’s good for detoxing. The liver, holy cow validation. Right. But it could be anything else. It could be like, oh my God, I’m still angry at my mother. Right. Oh my God, I have not forgiven my mother. It’s still there. And it’s, and it’s, you know, so you have to be open to anything.

Vir McCoy (27m 25s):
You have to be willing to see anything. And we now know, we know this, that, that so much of illness can have an emotional component. And when I say emotional, I’m talking about a stuck emotion. I’m talking about an emotion that never got, felt an emotion that got stuffed inside, and it’s there waiting for us to feel it. And we now know what to study with epigenetics that these emotions can be passed on from our ancestors, that the unfelt feeling of your great grandfather, you know, if he was traumatized in some way, you know, raped, abused, abandoned, betrayed, and he couldn’t process it.

Vir McCoy (28m 13s):
He couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t emote it. He’s going to stuff it inside and guess who has to deal with it, your dad, you know, and if your dad can’t deal with it, yet suits got to deal with it. You, right? So it became apparent to me that a part of healing, not all healing, but a part of healing was feeling the feelings that never got felt tapping into those stuck emotions. And eventually, and it becomes a practice, the practice of forgiveness. Wow. After I felt those feelings of anger, rage, sadness, grief, frustration, whatever it is, betrayal, abandonment, who can I come back to a place of forgiveness?

Vir McCoy (28m 58s):
Can I come back to a place of forgiveness? And I started to notice when I did this practice, not only the herbs and remedies that I started seeing, I started writing everything down, but I started working, practicing the art of forgiveness as well. I started to notice that my immune system was getting stronger, our immune system response to things like that, like our immune army, this wonderful, beautiful army of white blood cells and red blood cells. You know, if it’s as simple as well, it’s not simple, but if it’s, I don’t love myself, I don’t even want to be here. And I had to come up against that.

Vir McCoy (29m 39s):
What part of me doesn’t even want to be here? What part of me is like, wants to die? What’s that saying to you, your immune system? What is that saying to your own body? It’s saying to your army, like, well, why should we protect you? You don’t care. Let, let the enemy in, let them ravage you, you know? So at its core, we might actually say that immunity is luck. That immunity, a strong immune system is an immune system. That’s very, that’s love that you want to be here. That there’s a vigilance there’s boundaries. You know, I had to get back to like, how did I manage to get Lyme disease in the first place? You know? And so, so then line became this teacher, this teacher of, I need to be more loving and I need to be more of my power.

Vir McCoy (30m 29s):
It seems like a paradox, right? But it’s, it’s not, it’s, it’s this nature of, you know, if I look at you, what your immune system does, it’s like when a virus or bacteria comes into it, it gets it right. That’s a strong army. You know, our army is love to here we go to knock out the virus off with its head! Right. Right. But if your army is not functioning properly, it’s not working. Then we have to delve into the deeper issues, which could be genetic, you know, epigenetic, but still, well, can we use this process of love to heal the DNA, to heal the genetics?

Vir McCoy (31m 12s):
So, yeah. And I would say, yes, you know, along with your pills, along with your medicines, along with don’t, you know, don’t get rid of the doctor. Like you need people who are experts, but you have this incredible tool, this intuitive tool to help you get to the core, to help you. You’re Sherlock Holmes with your magnifying glass. That’s what it really is. And ah, I think that’s what medicine will help, you know. Exactly, exactly. And so, so we can get to the story of how I learned to, to bless the, the Lyme, which became the biggest thing. So over the years I started writing down all these, this, you know, my intuitive things I was getting.

Vir McCoy (31m 56s):
And it started to doing that work on the side while I was still taking all the antibiotics and pills and stuff, which were sort of working and sort of not, but slowly but surely I started to trust my own intuition. And I started to take things like the mushrooms every day. And I had a bunch of things that I write about in the book that became very apparent. Like I kept seeing glasses wine, you know, if your listeners like, imagine that you’re that Sherlock Holmes and you have an image of a glass of wine, what’s a glass of wine. You know, what is wine? I dunno. So I looked up wine and line disease, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, oh, there’s something called resveratrol in wine.

Vir McCoy (32m 40s):
Turns out that’s an important way to treat Lyme disease. So reserveratol is found and a bunch of other plants. It’s an important medicine. It’s like, it’s like the wine without the alcohol. Right, right, right. And so I started doing all these slew thing, you know, I, I wrote down hundreds of things. Some of them, I still don’t even know what they are. I couldn’t figure out what I wrote down, but I kept having consistency with all these images. So anyway, I built this whole protocol that I lay out in the book that looked similar to other people’s protocols, but also had huge breakthroughs on like how to get to the cysts or the eggs.

Vir McCoy (33m 20s):
But the hugest, the biggest healing that I had was I, I, you know, I was getting better, but I went out to the desert by myself. Okay. You know, I went out there for 10 days, didn’t talk to anybody and just went out there and I was like, I’m getting to the bottom of it. And

Christine Okezie (33m 41s):
What year was this? Like how, how many?

Vir McCoy (33m 44s):
2000, 2008. Right. Seven years into it. Yeah. About seven years into it. Right now it’s doing a lot better, but it was still sick. I went out to the desert and I laid out there for 10 days and prayed on the seventh or eighth day, I went into as many people with Lyme disease, you know, or illness or chronic illness. I went into a full panic attack and a lot of people with Lyme disease and long haul COVID will go into these panic attacks, these absolute anxiety places where you just feel like you’re gonna die. You know, you, you spiral into fear and you feel like you’re going crazy and you can’t come out of it.

Vir McCoy (34m 29s):
So here I am laying in my tent and I’m like, oh my God, I’m going to die out here. I’m going to die. They’re going to find the sky out here, like in four weeks or something, you know, I’ve just panicking. And I had this moment of what am I so afraid of? What am I afraid of? Why am I so afraid of this little bacteria? You know, what am I so afraid of this little creature that’s in me? Like I’m terrified of it. Why I, and I started to think about that. You know, I, I’ve done all this meditation where we’re looking for the remedies, intuitively Mike, I’m holding my body and love.

Vir McCoy (35m 15s):
And suddenly I had this idea of what if I love for life. And it was like this thing being, being, being, being the series of bells, went off, you know, universal chimes of like, yes. And I was like, oh my God, isn’t that what Jesus said? Jesus said, bless the enemy. Oh my God. Isn’t didn’t Buddhists say things like that. Oh my God. Didn’t Gandhi say that didn’t, you know, didn’t every Sage and Saint that we’ve ever had say, you know, love the enemy and it, and it shot. It was like this ripple. Wow. I know. I was like, okay, I’m going to love the enemy. How do I do that?

Vir McCoy (35m 56s):
Okay. Well, first I get into a loving space and think about the things that I love, the trees, the stars, you know, the desert, my mom, you know, my wife to be, I wasn’t married at the time. You know, the child, I might have some day, you know, that kind of thing. Like what, what do I love? And then I imagine what the line would look like, look like, and your listeners, you can do this with anything. You could do this with the fact, the virus that you’re dealing with, the, you know, the HIV that the LA COVID, the, the Epstein bar that, you know, whatever it is that you’re, you’re dealing with, you can do this with anything. If the enemy, right.

Vir McCoy (36m 38s):
Quote in quote the enemy. So I’m, I’m holding. I started to hold the line, but what I imagined, it looked like, and to me, it looked like this little alien, evil spider, right? This Canticle little thing that was in me and I’m holding it and I’m sitting I’m blessing. And I’m saying, I love you. I love you. Why are you, why are you here? You know, I love you. And it was the Ziff, this place of like, you know, when you love the monsters, it disarms them because it’s, it’s the last thing that they expect. But in a way it’s actually the thing they’re looking for.

Vir McCoy (37m 20s):
Right, right. Because I suddenly had the sense of like, wow, this, this thing is alive. I mean, it’s at the bottom of the totem pole of life, but it’s alive. It’s part of the universe. It’s part of creation. It is part of me, this thing is like a fallen angel. You know, what if this thing could still love, is this, is there a place at the thing that, you know, the most evil of the evil could still be, you know, still receive love on some level or at least like, you know, so I’m, I’m in my tent, I’m holding it. And I started having this sense of like, wow, this thing has been around for eons and what a terrible existence.

Vir McCoy (38m 6s):
Imagine if I was alive to see. So imagine if I was the virus, what a terrible existence, you know? And I started to have a sense of compassion for it. Like, wow, I’m so sorry that this is your existence. You know, this is how horrible I love you. I see you as part of the unit first, you know, I’m praying for you. I’m praying for you to climb up the life. Carmen, totem pole, you know, am blessing, blessing this enemy. Yes. And in that I felt the whole disease start to weaken and I felt all the fear go away. It was like, I’m not afraid of you.

Vir McCoy (38m 48s):
I mean, you, you can, yeah. Maybe you can take the spotty, right. Maybe I’m right. But then there’s a separation, but you can’t kill who I really am. You cannot kill my spirit. You know, you can’t. And so it’s, it’s an anchoring when we anchor it love that felt sense of love. That’s who we really are. And so coming from that place, it’s like that place, that place, it’s not going to die. And that’s a whole nother thing that you have to get to around the fear of death, which I write about in my book, which I did go through many times, you know, and getting past that fear of death. So in that place, in my tent, suddenly it was like, the lime had no power over me anymore.

Vir McCoy (39m 33s):
I blessed it. I love you. I’m sending you love. I see you. I love you. And then the second thing was, it’s just like in martial arts, you know, when we bow to the enemy, we say, we, we take a moment. We S we look at them in the eye, you know, before we’re going to fight. And we said, I love you. I see you. I recognize you as a, as a, as, as a life for correct. And now I’m going to kick the living crap out. And now I’m going to cut your head off. And now I’m going to burn you out of my body. And now I’m going to liberate to you. And what’s so cool about the word.

Vir McCoy (40m 14s):
Liberation is liberation implies. We’re actually freeing something back to the universe. You know, it’s like Gandalf running down the hill in Lord of the Ringds. It’s straight into the orcs, you know, to kingdom come, you know, there’s a oneness back from once you came, I love you. I love you and get the hell out of me right now.

Christine Okezie (40m 43s):
Incredible. Thank you for that. Yeah. There’s so much, you know, the process, essentially, it’s such an inward journey really. And it makes me, you know, kind of really appreciate when it wouldn’t be. When people say, you know, you have everything you need to heal. The body’s innate wisdom to heal the desire to heal. It has to be so much of a choice to embark on this inquiry, right. And to really kind of not to stop giving away our power. You know, I feel like what it was, it was a reclaiming. It was like a reconnecting or rediscovering, you know, to, and everybody has this.

Christine Okezie (41m 27s):
This is the message in your book. That is so empowering for us to read is that we are, this is our design. You know, this is our birthright, really, you know, given the vessel that we have to heal and to journey through this existence. So it’s, it’s really divine. I love your mantra. I think it captures it in the moment. We just said this, you develop the daily mantra. I think that came from this, this part of your healing journey. Thank it. Bless it. Burn. It is what you went on to kind of say to you, right? Yes. Yeah.

Vir McCoy (41m 60s):
That became, that became the, the mantra, right. Of thank it. Bless it. Burn it. And I just could say that over and over again. So it’s not saying that you shouldn’t take your pills and your medicines, you know, that’s part of it, that’s important, but that this, these tools become paramount. So, and I’m giving your listeners the shortcut, which took me like eight years, seven years to, to, to figure out. And it wasn’t long after I came out of that desert that I was done. I was just done. I mean, I didn’t, I haven’t had any Lyme symptoms for like 12 years now.

Vir McCoy (42m 41s):
Wow. You know, it was just, it was just done. And it was like, you can’t, it can’t, you can’t come back. My immune system, you know, literally I feel like my immune system just burned it out. It just got a hold of got a hold of it. So, so, so these, these become, these tools become paramount. They become your number one and two tools. And that’s why I start the book off with this. And I say that your number one tool is, is love. And your number two tool is fire. You know,

Christine Okezie (43m 10s):
When you say fire in your belly, you know, this really spoke to me as a Kundalini yoga teacher practitioner. You know, we talk about that fire. We talk about that in, in, you know, traditional systems of healing that, that, that life force, you know, that digested that Kundalini essentially.

Vir McCoy (43m 28s):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. So, you know, part of that was out in the desert when I saw that, you know, th that martial arts idea now, now get off me, you know, and it was, came really clear to me shortly after that was, I was in meditation and I’d heard the words, the only pill you need is the fire in your belly. And it was like, wow, I, you know, I wasn’t ready for that before, but I was ready for that after the desert. And it was this, this like, right, that stuff, part of like reclaiming my power, finding that Kundalini, finding whatever we’ll want to call it, that, you know, our, our mana, our Hora Archie, our, our will, our passion, our, our fire, you know, for back of the letter work, for lack of better word fire, you know, a fire in the gut, you know, that thing that drives us, that the warrior part of us, you know, the things that, the thing that makes us get back up, pull out the sword and charge back in there, right.

Vir McCoy (44m 36s):
That fire, and really on a, on a deeper level, it’s like, what’s fire protecting fires, protecting love. You know, it’s like, I am loved, but you cannot mess with me kind of thing. You know? So we say that it’s boundaries, Carolyn Myss, and there’s a really, well-known author says that the root of all disease is a loss of power on some level. Wow. I mean, that’s huge, you know, and I wouldn’t have believed that if you would have told me that, but early in my, my illness, but I got to that same place. So it became this place of how can I build a Spire? How can I reclaim my fire?

Vir McCoy (45m 20s):
And I write a lot about this in the book. And it’s like, well, boundaries, you know, that you have to look at things of like, how is it that, that the Lyme disease is existing in me? You know, like lime is like a parasite. So we have to look at things like, Hey, am I parasitic in my own relationships? Where am I losing my power? What’s draining my energy in a way that’s unhealthy, you know, who’s, parasitizing me. We all have these things where we get into relationships where we’re like, save me. This person’s going to save me. Is that healthy? No, of course not. We’ve completely lost her sovereignty, but we get into these, the survival places where we hook into people and we hook into things.

Vir McCoy (46m 6s):
But when you do that, it opens up your energy field. It opens you up to other parasitic types of entities, critters, and bugs, like Lyme disease to more easy get into. Right. And then, so here we are back into this place of like, how can I have more sovereignty, healthy, love, you know, an unconditional kind of love with someone. And then you got to get into your emotional stuff. You know, again, the forgiveness work with the ancestors, you know, with yourself, like, like, how might that be dampening my immune system, what’s dampening my immune system.

Vir McCoy (46m 46s):
What’s dampening the fire, the power of my own inner intelligence to transform my body back to healing. So yeah, that became, that became a practice. I mean, one of the things that I did that really jumped started with me. And so I was seeing a native American practitioner and he said, you need to do a fire ceremony. And I was like, what’s that you sit up for 24 hours and you light a fire and you do pranayama into the fire. And I did that for 24 hours. I drank water and I did as much as I could. And he said, and you want to throw everything into the, that doesn’t serve you anymore.

Vir McCoy (47m 31s):
You want to throw all the parasites, you want to throw the Lyme. You want to throw everything. You want to see it just burning. You want to self self in Emily immolate means a burn, right. Set yourself on fire, right purification. So I did that for 24 hours and I’m my God. That was so powerful. And that was just a few months after I came out of the desert. And that became this, this, this, you know, this thing of like, I’m done. I no longer this no longer is serving me anymore. So the Lyme disease in a sense, became a teacher, right?

Vir McCoy (48m 11s):
Thank you for helping me get back into my power. Absolutely. And it doesn’t mean that it just ends like that. It becomes a practice, the practice, the practice of keeping your fire lit the practice of forgiveness. The practice of love, the practice of vigilance, continuing

Christine Okezie (48m 31s):
To develop that sensory perception and that sensory awareness, which is really fundamental to you going forward to your point, going forward, that is your primary tool, right? Being able to Intuit. So that, and I love the way that you combine the two, because not many folks in, in the, you know, holistic health, natural healing space have made that connection, which is we use this wonderful sort of psyche body, mind system to Intuit, to feel into. And then we point that points us into the direction. And then we asked for help and we’re able to ask for help from a much more genuine place, or we’re able to be in a, this is this, this is how this stuff works, right?

Christine Okezie (49m 15s):
The way that you found the National Geographic article, you, we become receptive and, and lo and behold, all the things I found this to be true in my life. And on many levels, when you are, when you make it your primary motivation to become receptive, to be a good vehicle for intelligence to come through, right. And the people, places, emails, you know, ideas, cross your path, cross your path. And they inevitably, you know, so yes, we do the research and yes, we seek the expert help. But the, as you said, where’s the power.

Vir McCoy (49m 49s):
Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. And that really becomes the healing. You know, we can take all the pills in the world and if you haven’t forgiven your father, all the pills in the world, you know, or your mother or whoever it is, all the pills in the world might not help. It becomes a practice. And it also becomes a place of like being okay with, you know, actually this disease might kill me. I might, I might actually just die. And I had that come up a couple of times it with Lyme disease. So like, you know what, but I can die in a place where it’s okay, because I’m not, I’m not afraid to die. This thing did take me over.

Vir McCoy (50m 29s):
And I, I just, I did my best and it’s time to leave, but, but to be able to leave in a place of peace. Exactly.

Christine Okezie (50m 39s):
Yeah. And I’ll quote you in the book and this kind of gave me chills. You know, you said, you know, you, you came to know that the spirit is not sick. The body is going through an initiation. Right. I thought that was just so beautiful because that’s that moment where you say, okay, this is the body. The body is struggling, but I am not my body. I’m not my mind. I am so much something greater. Right. And from that perspective, wow. Talk about being, you know, open and receptive and Le on allowing love to come through, you do a beautiful job of talking about how this is so relevant today.

Christine Okezie (51m 21s):
Okay. Especially now everybody’s talking about their immune system, their nervous system, you know, parlance, you know, common parlance and, and mainstream and whatnot. What is your, what’s the number one thing that you want people to know about their immune systems today?

Vir McCoy (51m 39s):
Well, in the book, actually, I say, and it’s a quote actually from, from one of my, my girlfriend at the time when she was helped helping me, and she just looked at me and she said, immunity is love. And, and I put that in the book, Angela Layton said that. And you know, that’s, that’s what I came to in the desert was that, that like, if on its deepest, deepest, deepest, core immunity is love. You know? So that, that comes to, to this practice of, you know, I know we’re dealing with so much right now, how we can build our immune systems and how we can get stronger.

Vir McCoy (52m 22s):
And that’s important, but it’s as simple as, as like, what would it be like to just lovingly get in that space of love and hold your immune system, hold your army, hold all those white and red blood cells. Like, I love you. I empower you. I, I want you to be strong, you know, do I want you to do your job and protect me? You know, how can I help you? What do you need? What is the matter? Why aren’t you working? Right. You know, and just get into that loving space. So I would say, that’s the number one place, you know, hold the tumor, hold the cancer, hold it, you know, hold the immune system, like in a loving place and you have to, so number one, trust love always.

Christine Okezie (53m 10s):
And, and what a profound lesson in 2021, you know, that just permeates everywhere.

Vir McCoy (53m 17s):
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And, you know, going back to what you were saying about like, it’s really about anchoring in that place, anchoring in that place of love, because that’s who we really are. So when we say I’m sick or I am, you know, I am ill or I am, it’s like, are you, is that what you, what are you saying to your body, your spirit, your soul, that, that, you know, that divinity, that divine spark is not sick. It’s not sick, you know, but you have to come to that place as well. And so when you say things like I’m sick, you don’t want to say that you want to say my body is not feeling well.

Vir McCoy (54m 2s):
My body is having a hard time that’s right now and come from that place and that place of love. And I’m working on healing, this body, this con, this beautiful container.

Christine Okezie (54m 13s):
Mm, thank you. Oh my God, Vir. Thank you so much. I encourage everyone to buy “Liberating From Lyme” as fast as you can, even if you don’t have Lyme disease, or suspect you have Lyme disease. This is a manual. This is a book of wisdom, really when it comes to disease and healing in the body. So thank you so much for sharing it.

Vir McCoy (54m 34s):
You’re you’re so welcome. All right. Thank you. Bye-bye.