July 23-24 was the second weekend of my Depth Diagnosis course with Stephen Buhner. It was great, we learned all these practices, exercises for strengthening and working with heart perception. It was great, exhausting, wonderful, etc. Anyway.

At the end of the class, I bought Stephen’s new book, Healing Lyme. It’s about Lyme disease. Why? I don’t have Lyme disease, but a dear friend of mine struggled with it for a long time. I figure knowledge is power. I am also kind of fascinated by dangerous creepie crawlies. In the same way that some people love horror movies. Once I spent a whole day researching brown recluse spider bites.

If you’re not familiar with it, Lyme is a terrible infection that affects the joints and nervous system mainly, sometimes the skin too. And it’s very difficult to cure. The book has a lot of technical information, but is also fascinating and scary, the way Stephen depicts the spirochetes, or spiral shaped bacteria. These creatures, Borrelia, are like the ninjas of the bacterial world. They change form in response to your immune system. They create these kind of stealth shields out of proteins in your body to hide from your immune system. They hide in tissues that antibiotics don’t usually reach. They play games on your immune system and trick it into attacking itself. They are truly impressive and fascinating creatures. But I am not eager to meet them in person!

Lyme disease, or Lyme borreliosis, is spread by ticks.

And, one of life’s sick jokes, guess what I found this morning when I was in the bath.

I don’t know ticks well enough to know if this was a deer tick or something else. But I was in shorts in a woodsy place that I know is inhabited by a lot of deer on Thursday. So it could have been a deer tick for all I know. This is a terrible feeling. So I’ll skip ahead to the chapter on prevention.