The HIV/AIDS road is extremely demanding for anyone who chooses it. For the doctors, journalists, scientists, health practitioners and others whose desire to know drives them to navigate its turns, it can be treacherous, deceptive and polarizing. For those consigned to the road by diagnosis, who must drive it when least prepared, it is the ultimate grand prix, one that liberates or terminates.
For me it has been liberating. Many of my friends, less assertive than I, have been less fortunate. This road forced me into self examination and reappraisal that I had, until then, successfully avoided. I learned to embrace the diverse and contradictory elements within myself, and in the process I found my centre - one that has joy at the core. I have become present in my life in a way I had never been before. And perhaps most importantly, fear no longer drives my car down this road. I do.
I credit my friends as being largely responsible for my well-being. They taught me that love and acceptance, even of those parts of me I would rather have hidden, are most potent healing powers. They taught me that I could show my anger, my confusion, my ugliness, and they would still be there to love me. And their acceptance helped launch me on a journey that I now believe I was destined to take.
I will tell you my story - what I have done, what I discovered about myself, and how it has affected my health. It is a story of process, not of destinations, of engagement and choices, not holy grails and magic cures. It is a story of accepting responsibility for my own body, my own health and my own life. Deepak Chopra talks in The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, of finding the uniqueness within ourselves, searching out the unique needs in the world that mirror our special abilities, and then serving humanity with our talents.
HIV/AIDS has helped me to find, accept and celebrate my own particular flame. If, with what follows, I can in any small way use my flame to be of service, to provide some of my fire to lighten some of your dark, I will have performed my intended function.
Here are the facts as I know them:
Beginning in 1984 with the first AIDS death of a close friend, I began to suppress my intense fear of contracting the disease and of dying. Then in March 1986, against the advice of my then doctor, I had the HIV antibody test performed. I tested positive. In July 1987, after three years of fear and obsession over the likelihood of contracting AIDS, a lesion on my leg was biopsied, diagnosed as Kaposi's Sarcoma. I had a confirmed AIDS diagnosis.
In August of that year, an oncologist in Santa Monica, California, to whom I had been sent for treatment recommendations, observed during my consultations, that AIDS is an inexorable disease, from which there could be no recovery. I could expect to live 6 months to 2 years. For his kindness in offering me such a conclusive prognosis, I refrained from punching him in the nose. In restrospect, and in honour of my Irish ancestry, if I had it to do again, I would not be so kind to the doctor.
I began putting my affairs in order, planned my retirement from my law practice, and sold my house in order to finance living until my death. It did not work out as I had planned.
In those first years, even when my fear was greatest, I made several decisions intuitively that were important, and I believe, correct. One began with an awareness that the cure was not out there, somewhere in the world to be sought out and found, but inside myself. I knew instinctively that if I became frantic, desperate to find the one external cure, treatment, or remedy that would restore me to health, I would fail. The secret decision I made was not to take AZT. I told my doctor that if that were the only bullet in the gun, that I would wait to use it until the last possible moment. I have not used any orthodox medical intervention through to the present time.
Here is what happend:
Beginning in 1984 and excalating in 1986, I began a concentrated program of aerobic exercise, in my case aerobic movement classes, for a minimum of 45 minutes a day, minimum of three days a week. I believed than, and continue to believe, that the concentrated and intense forcing of oxygen through the body system that aerobic exercise causes, is cleansing and healing. I believe it to be a major force in maintaining internal balance.
Early on, when I was most frightened and confused, I believed that if I could at least execute the aerobic forms excellently and impeccably for the rest of my life, then the rest of my path would fall into place. It allowed me a good beginning, and was a model for taming fear and moving forward.
Shortly after my HIV positive test, I started Transcendental Meditation (TM). Within one month, my CD4 count had increased by 60% and my ratio of CD4s to CD8s had inverted to 1:2. I continue its use twice a day, for twenty minutes at a time. Whether TM or some other form of quieting, I felt it very important to introduce some meditation onto one's health protocol. One, it is genuinely quieting of the system, reduces fear and stress, and promotes internal stability. Two, the act of keeping daily personal growth appointments is healing and self-affirming in and of itself.
In June of 1987, after discovering a suspicious growth on my left leg, I began using visualisation, even though I had no training in it. I designed an exercise, pulling white, cold, hard starlight in through my head, slowly filling my circulatory system, and then, when filled, energising it to purify my bloodstream. The first time I used it, while standing, I was jolted so strongly when I energised the light, that I was nearly toppled over.
In August of 1987, at Esalen in California, I took a weekend seminar with Jeanne Achterberg and Frank Lawliss called Imagery in Healing - the Use of Visualisation. The concepts and methods Jeanne presented, pioneered by Dr Carl Simonton, resonated so strongly with me that I immediately began to incorporate visualisation as a cornerstone of my healing protocols.
Although scheduled for plastic surgery in December 1987 to have the lesion on my leg removed by visualisation work gradually and almost imperceptibly lessened the lesion, so I was able to cancel the surgery. The lesion had totally disappeared, leaving no mark, by the beginning of January 1988. Subsequent lesions in 1990 and 1994 have diappeared in the same manner, after a regimen of visualisation treatments, and other associated protocols.
In early 1988, at the urging of one of my closest friends, I met and began working with a shaman from Peru. The work, using Ayuwaska (an hallucinogenic South American Herb) and mushrooms, was an ongoing ceremonial encounter with fear and dying. The work occured once a month, and though I fought the unknown valiantly for almost a year, I eventually surrendered to the learning, and began my understanding of and eventual release from the fear of dying.
Since I believe fear of dying to be the most potent threat to daily interior calm, this process, more than any other, has positioned me for meaningful living. In the most profound way, I made contact with my soul and experienced, beyond capacity for doubt, an ever-present awareness of alternative realities layered, like the skin of an onion, all exisitng at the same time. Linear time, and its constant companion death, lost its tyrannical hold over me. In traditional shamanic journey work, the journeyer must be willing to experience death, in order to cross over into expanded reality. It was within that expanded interior awareness of ubiquitious multiple realities that the journeyer becomes a healer. Whether it be through this door, or prayers, self-healing is facilitated by taking death into one's arms, accepting this most intimate of partners, and moving forward from that dance. If you believe in afterlife, and feel comfortable in knowing that all this is far from over, then you are in a good position to begin living without the tyranny of fear. Neutralising the dark and terrible fear of dying is the single most important step in achieving meaningful living.
In 1990, I began the use of Chinese Herbs. This approach, consonant with the Eastern concept of interior balance and harmony, is used to achieve health over time and through a gradual process. I have changed my diet and eating frequency. I eat almost no red meat, increased quantities of fruit, vegetables and rice, and eat smaller meals more frequently. I continue with these regimens as described, and strongly believe that this process of balance combined with the disempowering of toxic fear are responsible for my well-being and for my intense pleasure in being. I more and more look at my life as one of service as Dr Chopra has described.
To quote Bernie Siegel from Love, Medicine and Miracles: Science teaches us that we must see in order to believe but we must also believe in order to see. We must be receptive to possibilites that science has not yet grasped, or we will miss them. Finally, as Carl Simonton persuasively observed: In the face of uncertainity, there is nothing wrong with hope. do not do this work alone. Incorporate intimates into your process, work with doctors as partners, take responsibility for your own journey, use this intense challenge as an opportunity for interior work. Most importantly bring hope to this encounter.

Marshall Smith