Unconditional Healing with Jeff Rubin
Can a person embrace immense adversity in their life to not only cope, but to thrive and discover their most authentic self?
As a teacher of Buddhist meditation and psychology for four decades, and someone "blessed" with a chronic illness for two of those decades, Jeff Rubin has been obsessed with answering this question. This obsession led him to develop a program called Unconditional Healing, a new model of health that has helped countless people transform their relationship to pain, adversity, and illness, and unlock their own storehouse of confidence and resilience.
In this podcast, Jeff explores the principles of Unconditional Healing with talks, healing practices, and interviews with those who have discovered how to thrive in the face of adversity. He also features guests who are experts or thought leaders in a particular aspect of health and well-being. If you are dealing with an acute or chronic illness, the loss of a loved one or your livelihood, the dissolution of a relationship, or any other adverse circumstance that has you feeling anxious and confused, then this podcast is definitely for you. Especially if you’re looking for a more nuanced, more spiritual way to work with life's inevitable difficulties.
Please note the podcast is currently on hiatus, but all episodes remain available on all the major podcast platforms.
Unconditional Healing with Jeff Rubin
Interview with Allie Cashel - A Journey of Self-Discovery
This episode is about one young woman’s coming of age while battling a chronic illness (Lyme and tick-borne infections in this case) and her journey of self-discovery. Allie Cashel is a Lyme disease warrior, advocate, and author. I also was diagnosed and treated for Lyme in my own healing journey and encountered many of the same obstacles that Allie describes, so I was very interested in having her as a guest on the show.
With chronic Lyme, one needs to be a warrior because there are so many unnecessary obstacles put into one’s path. Did you know that doctors can lose their license to practice medicine if they have the audacity to treat Lyme with alternative methods, including prescribing antibiotics for more than 30 days? My own Lyme specialist had to put non-Lyme diagnosis codes on my scripts so he could prescribe antibiotics for months at a time. That’s because for many illnesses an extended antibiotic regimen is not questioned, yet for Lyme, it is.
Allie speaks of her shame, being unable to share her symptoms and illness with even her close friends lest they think less of her. This is often the case with so-called "invisible" illnesses. In Allie’s case, a major debilitating flare-up in the 12th grade resulted in a highly rated infectious disease doctor accusing Allie of not being sick, but having a mental regression to an earlier age to get her mother’s attention. This same highly acclaimed doctor accused Allie’s mom of being a horrible parent for trying to cure Allie of a "phantom illness".
Allie eventually used these obstacles to write a ground-breaking book and start a non-profit dedicated to Lyme advocacy and resources. Her journey is right in the Unconditional Healing wheelhouse, of using adversity and illness as a source of self-discovery and honing of character.