hi this is Ursula and you're listening to Catholic versus other so tell the listeners if you would a little bit about yourself who you are what you believe and how you came to believe it ah who I am that's an interesting question I am the product I think of my parents and their parents and their parents and everything that all of those generations experienced all the traumas all the good things I came to that realization basically yesterday after doing a Reiki session where I was able to see suffering that members of my family experienced as well as my own previous life that I had lived I believe then I guess if I had to find a closest religion to describe it to maybe you would be Buddhism so I guess I believe in some form of reincarnation and suffering every time you come back until you figure out what it is what trauma it is that has been passed down through your family and once you figure that out and you're able to work through it and not be angry and only feel loved and be grateful then you're able to come back and be eternally happy or if you were tactic against you would say you would be able to go to heaven prior to yesterday how would you have described yourself if you're able to talk me through a little bit from childhood up until yesterday and then what happened yesterday and it sort of took today childhood I say I didn't believe in anything per se I guess you'd say I was an atheist I wasn't baptized I wasn't raised with any type of religion in my life but both my mother and my father are quite Buddhist weaning so my mother studied religion at Concordia University and she was very drawn to Jainism that's something that she really identified which I think has something to do with nature if I'm not taken and my dad I would say also has Buddhist beliefs but my dad is very confused person so hard to pin down exactly what he believes but when you were growing up did you encounter this notion that people are talking about God and stuff like nobody talks about God around me nobody talks about God at all in my life we did not go to church God was never mentioned we didn't pray there was no saying grace before meals or any of those type of things have you ever prayed three to four years ago I started praying what prompted that I was not living here in Montreal so I was away from my family I was away from my friends I felt very isolated and very scared and very unhappy and I was with somebody who was not nice to me and there was a lot of anger in the house and I felt very poisoned by anger it started with insomnia it didn't start as like an actual prayer to God it started more as a type of mantra thing where I would just say everything is going to be okay everything is going to be okay everything is going to be okay and I say that over hundreds to thousands of times until I fell asleep which sometimes I wouldn't sleep at all the whole night and from there it progressed to be your God I need your help please help me I know you can help me I want to be a better person and to then reaching out to some of my friends when you were religious I had one good friend who is quite quite religious and she Spanish and she went to a Spanish Church in Montreal so I know it was a very like joyous Church it was a lot of music and it wasn't like what I pictured Church would be and it was a really nice experience so after we went to that church I asked if we could go to Saint Joseph's oratory just because I don't be Spanish so even though I really enjoyed the service I had no actual idea of what was being said because it was not my language I understood but I still felt definitely the spirit in the love that was in the church I went to st. Joseph's a couple of times maybe once or twice and one of the times that I was there I don't know who at the time that we saw each other but a woman was walking around with a petition she was dressed very Ottaway she was sort of dressed like out of the 40s or 50s and she was walking around with a petition about abortion and I just thought I don't think that's the place to be doing that in a church and it really turned me off and so I never went back to st. Joseph's after that I also in the past gone to Jehovah's Witness church while living in Virginia again I was I guess away from the family I was not living in a bad situation though I was living in a good situation but still away from people I know and just maybe he's not on board and having nothing to do I decided to try out the Jehovah's Witness I don't know what they call the temple temple yeah I was interesting that a lot of really nice people everybody was very friendly oh and also when I was in the state's I had an amazing experience of going to a black Optus Church in Virginia where me and my husband at the time were the only white people in church and as soon as the start as a sermon the priests priests the posh pastor like sort of identified as that's like oh clearly these are two new people here and everybody was just so happy and welcoming and collapsing and I mean just like the hallelujah is erupting all over the place and you can just feel like all the love and all the joy so that was an amazing experience I think because I didn't have any religion in my life growing up I think I've always been looking for something to believe in and I've always been terrified terrified terrified of dying growing up I always was under the impression that I would die by drowning by the age of 35 this was just a feeling I had how old are you now if you don't mind I'm 42 and on doctors everyone so I survived but now I know why I had that thought now I know I thought was something I thought about something this is something I realized yesterday during this thing that I guess we'll talk about sure yeah you can talk about it now you had a session or something I had a Reiki session basically I've been very sick my whole life it started at the age of probably around ten or twelve years old 13 years old before that I had always been a fairly healthy kid and then I just all of a sudden seemingly overnight got very unhealthy so I was constantly sick I threw up all the time I had a lot of stomach problems a lot of recurring infections as I got older it turned into a lot of other health problems I was at the point where I was seeing in the past year or two I'd say two to three doctors a week spending a lot of time at singers Hospital had a few surgeries and my condition was annoyed most but they kept seeing an elevated white t-cell count which means that you have an infection that your body is hiding but they could never identify the infection so there was a sign that I was fighting an infection but then when they would do other tests it would say there is no infection and so many times I went to hospitals I went to doctors feeling like I was on the brink of death and I would get told you're fine there's nothing wrong with you go home you're paranoid take some anxiety pills completely disregarded until about I don't know a couple of months ago when the symptoms started getting quite a bit worse I started having a lot of neurological symptoms so having problems remembering my words I'm a writer I couldn't write I mix up my letters I've mixed up my words I would try to write something and I just I wouldn't be able to do it it was like there was a block and I also started having a lot of heart problems heart palpitations chest pain lung pain and this type of thing and I at one point even started having problems walking I felt very dizzy and I didn't know what was going on I had no idea what was going on around the same time my grandmother passed away she had been sick her whole life also she says she went through the Second World War she went through a lot of trauma in her life as did my grandfather and she never spoke about anything she kept everything inside of her and she had also like me recurring infections and she was always coughing which is one of the things that has been a problem for me a lot of coughing and like if you people who know me would know that this is not what my voice actually sounds like like I'm quite congested right now and so my grandmother passed away she died of pneumonia when she died they flipped her over in bed she was in a lot of pain she was fidgeting or watch she was very troubled and she hadn't slept in three days and she was terrified to close her eyes so she was terrified of dying she didn't want to die but I remember her telling me ten years before not to be afraid of dying and I said to her like why aren't you afraid of dying and she said to me well it's just like a tree when a tree dies or when the leaves fall off the tree it drives up it falls into the ground and then it decomposes and it goes into the earth and then that becomes the nutrients for new things to grow like other flowers and other shrubs and other plants and she said that's why I'm not afraid of dying that I know that me dying will cause a rebirth in a way of something else and so that gave me a little bit of comfort when she told me that that's something I would think about and then when she died I sort of felt like she became my angel so I started praying to her specifically I would pray to God but I would also pray to her and then I started praying to my grandfather also I was asking them basically for help I was asking them to help heal me I prayed a lot a lot a lot for my health I started looking up prayers online that are specifically for health like I guess you call them Catholic prayers Christian prayers and so I started just reading them off my phone and saying them out loud and I moved to an apartment that's located right in front of a church in Montreal Saint Michael's Church which is a Polish Church and so when I sit and work all day because I work from home I look out at the church all day so there's the church I see the cross I see the steeple and then I see a big huge tree and so that's what I look out to every day now and after being sick for all these years this week I went to the doctor and I was told that I have Lyme disease so basically wine disease is caused by being bit by a tick it's sort of like leutis and a lot of other conditions where there is a whole host of symptoms like if you look at the list of symptoms it's just insane because it's neurological symptoms it's heart symptoms it could be anything it's just the symptoms are so wide which is why it goes so undiagnosed especially in women and I think women are very disregarded in society but also by the medical profession I think when women go see a doctor they're told you're paranoid here taken anxiety pill and when men go see a doctor they're told oh wow you're a man and came to a doctor's you must be really sick I'm going to try and figure out what's wrong with you and that's been my experience in my thirty years of going to doctors so getting this diagnosis for me was like such a validation a that I wasn't gravy B that I was actually sick and then I started reading about Lyme and I joined a wine support group on Facebook and all of a sudden it's like there was a miracle I would say were all these people in my life contacted me to tell me things it's like I was getting messages from God and then I went for this Reiki session and during the session I saw the trauma that I lived I actually saw it I saw my childhood so I saw what happened to me and then I also saw different past life that I had had and I realized a that my fear of drowning was because of a past life where I drowned and that all of the pain I had in my body so let's say one of the pains that I have is extreme pain around my wrist around my knees and around my ankles and around my neck and that's because in the past life I was tied up to something in those places and then drowned during the Reiki session the practitioner put her hands over my ears and when she took her hands off I heard a popping noise in both ears and about five tablespoons of water poured out of each year so that wasn't imagined that I think that I saw she saw and ended up on my shirt and the bed that I was lying on so that's not something that's like nobody could have denied that it happened yeah we could just deny this source and yeah people can argue what what whatever what caused it but definitely physically water came out of my ears yeah I just want to say for the record yeah as a Catholic that I'm very wary of any spirituality is really mystical stuff and I am cautious even of Catholic mysticism okay never mind wacky and weird yeah New Age stuff yeah and I firmly believe that there's no such thing as reincarnation if there is reincarnation then Christianity is a false religion they're mutually exclusive so they can't both be true that's just my point of view I just want to make sure that I put that out there but what prompted you to go to do a Reiki session reading a lot on the support group of people who've been doing antibiotic treatment for weeks and months and years and not getting healthy not getting better and what does the word mean precious so Reiki the actual definition of region is made up of two words in Japanese ray which means God's wisdom or the higher power and ki which means lifeforce energy it's a sort of channeling of healing energy exactly that's exactly what it is it's a channeling of healing energy and so before the session started I had done Reiki once before or something similar five or six years ago but I didn't know at that time that I had Lyme I hadn't made a couple of other realizations in my life I hadn't been praying yet I was still very angry very sick blaming everyone just fed up with life basically and someone tried to do a sort of energy healing session on me and during the session because you have your eyes closed when you're doing it I just heard the woman go huh and she sort of tapped me on the shoulder and she said I can't do this she said there's a really really dark horse inside of you and it just came in my side and it scared me and I can't do this hmm sometimes yeah that freaked you out it says but I wasn't surprised and I've always felt like there was something foreign inside of me that didn't belong there I certainly can relate I mean I come from a family with lots of suicide lots of depression lots of dark stuff but my concern is that you sort of discovered prayer and you're reaching out to God intuitively and I think that's a good thing and then I feel now like you've been co-opted into something that's ungodly because we're talking about reincarnation and rekey which I consider demonic what role would my god play in that I honestly believe that if you look at Buddhism if you look at the Muslim religion if you look at Catholicism I think in the end it's all the same thing and I think the the most important thing about all those things is love and I think as long as a person believes in love then they're being godly and they're respecting their higher self and they're respecting other people higher self if you don't do anything out of anger if you don't do anything out of anything else other than gratefulness and love then I think whether you call it being Muslim or whether you call it being Catholic I think it's all the same thing so whether it's reincarnation or heaven I think but it's similar to Buddhism because I've heard in Buddhism this like samsara and the wheel in life and you come back and they're suffering every time until basically I think you live with compassion and love and then there's no more suffering and to me once you've dealt with your own trauma the trauma of your family and you're working with the people around not working with but you're helping the people around you we'll be their highest selves as well everybody is trying to achieve their highest selves their highest power to live with love to live with gratitude and I feel like the Reiki session sort of helped me figure out what my mission in life is supposed to be so do you plan on doing more sessions with that same person or with another practitioner definitely I plan on doing more sessions with her and actually have an appointment with her next week to deal with the blockages from past lives but I also plan on doing other things as well because I basically decided that I'm not going to be doing any antibiotics so I took my last time to biotic this morning and I'm not going to be doing any more even though I know that means I'm going to get very sick so I'm starting a little pink eye in the side right now I don't know if you can tell but and my voice and my heart is beating like probably about 150 beats a minute so all of my symptoms are going to come out that's the thing too when I left that session yesterday I walked in there feeling like well I was already feeling better cuz I already had some sort of continued to whatever you want to call them but uh I walked out of there feeling like a reborn person like a new person like ten thousand years of pounds of weight has been removed off of me and like I could actually see clearly for the first time in a long time and every interaction that I've had with people since then has been completely different so now when I see people instead of having negative thoughts or thinking of them again they're talking about this and I don't see it that way I see things totally differently nourish yeah and all of it is all from a good point of view I don't know how much you know oh I have a question for you actually I'd like to learn about Michael what is it Erica yeah I would like to learn about him because I was told by my Reiki Master that I should be praying to him oh so I find it interesting that she said to me he is the person whom you should be praying to yes so I wanted to ask you because I know you're very knowledgeable yeah I think they tell me a little bit about him Satan was a big glorious the most beautiful angel and he fell from grace and Michael was a small low ranked angel that with God and so Michael is responsible for defeating Satan in a certain sense he casts Satan to help the st. Michael prayer I pray every day and I recommend it to you to the incense that she was burning in the room during the session said Archangel Michael on it she's like well you obviously have a strong connection to him so that you should be bringing - she recommends a lot of Prayer she recommends a lot a lot of praying so you have to get down on your knees and pray yeah that's good and that's something I did actually of my own three days ago two days ago before the Reiki session when I found out I had Lyme I literally dropped to my knees and thank God for Lyme disease like thank you thank you thank you for wine disease because what it gives you an opportunity to heal heal and to be full of love instead of full paid I did speak to one Reiki practitioner and she said that there are demons involved but you are you troubled in your dreams by dark forces already I was I had a constant I have a few recurring dreams that were very very violent in nature very horrible but now I I know I had them because they were keys and signs of where the trauma happened in my life you know I'm a convert to Catholicism and I come from generational trauma and I haven't personally experienced anything that's what I thought haha I didn't think I had experienced anything either okay but I what I saw yesterday was something I wasn't aware of it was suppressed memory even from this life yes yeah I also believe that false memories in a false memories and we can't necessarily know what's real and what's not I wouldn't necessarily trust a vivid image from my childhood but having said that maybe who knows maybe I experience some trauma in this life I don't know yeah it's possible my memory's not that good anyway yeah and I do yeah that's a symptom of Lyme disease is it yeah I'd be interested in showing you the symptoms and seeing how many you have is the diagnostic a physical test or is it a checklist of symptoms it's there's a line test that you can do it's literally a 1 test but it's very inaccurate is better in the States and it's better in Europe the test that's used in Canada is not a very good test but the way I was diagnosed with it was basically through the immuno clinic at the marginal General Hospital well they took a lot of blood out of my body and they ran they ran all the tests they looked at t-cell counts and AMA levels and all this type of thing and then they injected me with pneumonia and pneumonia vaccine and then six weeks later I went back and they did tests again and then by looking at how my blood and cells and everything had reacted they were able to positively diagnosed me with Lyme disease like not like based on symptoms based on sure yeah and and wine disease for people who don't know is you get it bitten by a tick that's the only way that's the only way you can get one to see you do you remember the tick I've been bit by more than one tick the first one actually happened in one of the places where I had one of my recurring dreams about which was my country house one of my favorite places to go of the childhood and but I always had a recurring dream about horrible horrible things happening there tsunamis Ward's extreme violence to the extreme to the extreme where I would wake up and just be like how could I be having these dreams about this place that I loved so much that my grandfather built with his own hands and that my whole family would go to together and we would all eat together and sit together by it was like the most beautiful memories from my childhood my didn't understand how I could have this memory of it that was so or this dream why this dream but that was where I was bitten by a tick I want to find out a lot more about Lyme disease I want to find out a lot more about Buddhism I want to find out a lot more about Archangel Michael I want to find out a lot more about homelessness and First Nations issues and I have a lot of water learning to do because I have all I've spent a lot of my life not being very productive or useful and so I have a lot of catching up to do don't overdo it yeah I have to take care of myself - that's the thing too when you have Lyme disease you really have to take care of yourself because you're quite fragile so taking care of yourself and taking care of others so at the end of my interviews I usually ask my guests just to speak directly to the audience yeah just to wrap things up or do you say to anyone this was something I'll say to anyone who's listening if you have a fear in your life look at what that fear is and instead of being afraid be grateful and whenever you feel angry or you feel sad or you feel despair desperation instead try to feel loved and everything that you do do it out of compassion and empathy and try to be the best person and the highest form of yourself that you could be at all times and if there's people in your life who you think take away from that then maybe you shouldn't be hanging around them too much because you have to protect yourself a little bit - yeah you don't care what view if you can get be really got some questions ready and okay all you got to do in it