By Joan Calder, retired/volunteer work, Frome, UK. 

Hello! I am called Pityriasis Lichenoides by the medical profession, although they freely admit they do not know what causes me to exist. It’s a long complicated name but it makes me feel important and I had a big presence in the body where I have lived for eight years, in fact, you could say, I have been in control of the situation during that time — up until now.

I was born in the gut of a female human; my parents are of unknown origin, although there is a possibility it started with my hostess’s inflammatory reaction out of a response to Father Virus or Mother Bacterium. This is not surprising considering the way she maltreated her body, and her emotional reactions to everything around her. I lived quite happily in those long dark serpentine tubes for a long time until one day she met what is called a Gentle Breath Meditation and started to practise it.

My world was suddenly changed. I felt I was being called to come out of my tunnels of damp warmth, to be drawn to the surface into the light and the air, and explode myself on her skin for all to see. It started with a huge red patch of skin across her upper chest, and then one day I burst forth there with an itchy rash so virulent that hardly any skin could be seen.

Let me describe to you what I am like. I start to appear on the skin as little, very itchy, bumps or small pimples. It depends where I am located and what mood I am in. I cause as much irritation as I can at this stage, just to get attention. When I have achieved my goal and the heads of my pimples have been lacerated, then I start to form hard crusty scabs over the wounds. I stay dormant in this stage for a long time, getting crustier and crustier and ruminating on the effect I am having. I can make this stage really irritating and itchy for my hostess as well, and if it gets infected, then it heats up and spreads throughout the whole of that great organ of the skin where I express myself, and often back into internal organs as well.

In this stage I can make my hostess believe she is me. I possess her and she totally identifies with me.

Eventually I allow myself to fade, but I leave a brown scar for many months, if not years, to remind her I am the boss. As one lot fades then I find a new outlet and start again. I use the whole body except the face, I leave that to my cousin eczema, although she doesn’t use that very often, preferring to inhabit the life-sustaining moist hidden cavities of the ears.

I am sure you get the picture, but I have to tell you I am not so powerful these days and feeling distinctly weak and as though I am losing a lot of ground. I have no stability, and as soon as I start to appear, my hostess has found ways and means of dealing with me.

At first, in the past, these were desperate means, I could feel it, she would use anything and everything to try and combat me. This was war and I am very good at that game, my main allies being anger and deceit. Everything was waged against me: steroids, creams, lotions, UV rays. I retreated to base camp in the gut, my home-base, while they were going on, for they did my self- image no good at all, and recuperated until the onslaught stopped. Then gradually I would emerge again for a new round.

But there was one treatment that worked differently and I really did not like it. Having taught my mistress to do the Gentle Breath Meditation, esoteric healing practitioners were now calling me out to show even more of myself, roots and all, so they could be recognised and cleared. This way I would have nothing to hang onto. This was agony, having to let go. I raced from one part of the body to another attempting to escape the scrutiny, but the practitioner always knew where I was hiding, usually in a dense part where my hostess had been holding onto emotions for a long time, and eventually I would have to let go.

How do you fight something that says “Bring it on, show yourself, let’s see the real you, not just all that irritation and anger, but the you that really wants to come out into the open; the you that is truly loving if you would let yourself feel it.”

A RASH – LOVING? Rubbish, that wasn’t my image of myself at all, and it took me by surprise. I had made my hostess identify with me by my devious means so that she was caught in all the anger and irritation, and we had wound up in symbiosis, but here she was taking charge and turning the tables on me, and showing me a thing or two.

She showed me that nothing could hurt her, especially not me, because there was something much, much deeper and more powerful inside her than me. I might be lurking in the deep recesses of her body, but she was learning there is MORE to her than her body. I started to feel a chemical change I could no longer fight. It felt like Alchemy, a long forgotten ancient ability of some humans like mine. I lost the control and am fading fast.

She showed me that I am loving, as my very existence and expression on her skin has given her an important message about how she was living her life. Because she sees I was created out of her own choices and I am actually an illusion, she is changing and healing.

If she forgets and chooses the food of irritation and anger I am still trying to feed her, then I have an opening and can spring up again, but it’s weak and ineffectual. If she does not react in an inflammatory way but chooses to actually love me for what I am showing her, then I have no reason for being at all.

Suddenly I realise I have been in a prison, locked into an identity that no longer serves me, and that life of creating pain and havoc and investing in that for sustenance and reward, no longer seems relevant to me. I feel I have been very young, and now I am growing up to realise there is more outside this skin I have created eruptions on, and I no longer look like my old self, in fact sometimes I can make no mark, I am not there at all. This feels like freedom, released to live and dance with all the other particles that make up the Universe. I would never have believed it possible, so entrenched was I in my self-gratifying, addictive existence.

I no longer have a name or an identity. My hostess is no longer giving that to me, and I am passing slowly out of my habitation to a new state of being. It started on the day my hostess first met the practitioner who showed her a new way. It’s taken her a long time to understand it and start living it. She no longer needs me and is becoming lighter; if she keeps on choosing all this for herself, I must loosen my hold and fade away, and so we will move on together. We are not quite there yet, but it is happening now we both know the Truth is always there for us to choose.

From the hostess  … With deep gratitude and appreciation for Serge Benhayon who showed me I am so much more than my physical symptoms, and the many Universal Medicine Practitioners I have worked with these past 8 years.

Read more:

1. Gentle Breath Meditation Tips for Beginners
2. Gentle Breath Meditation Introduction 
3. How do I become a practitioner of esoteric healing?