Meeting our electric selves

We forget, sometimes, what electric beings we — most fundamentally — are; I know I did too, until a recent series of events forced me to delve deeply into the fact. I was used to having sensitivities of all kind but then I developed one – a very profound one, to electromagnetic triggers in my environment – that became something I was forced to sit up and take notice of because it was affecting everything about my life. It had been there hovering on the sidelines for the longest time and I was more than aware of that group of people that label themselves electrosensitives as I had come across many of their articles and suggestions for how to cope. For my own part, I knew that I couldn’t be around extremely electrically charged environments without consequences in my health; had long since rid my house of its cordless phone and switched off our wifi router at nighttime but the new degree of sensitivity coming up at me like a tidal wave, at the end of last year, was so much bigger than all that and started to mess with head as much as my lifestyle. What it took me on was a remarkable journey to where I was able to meet my electric-self half way, to shake hands with it and newly respect all that being a walking-talking electromagnetic field entails, including the responsibilities of care and optimisation that come with the turf.

The sort of sensitivity I’m talking about here is where you can feel the electricity coursing through the wires of your home like a wall of sensation, a barrage of overwhelm. Where electric lights and all those other electromagnetic aspects teeming through the environment in shops and public places make you swoon with exhaustion the minute you step into them. The kind where the electric field radiating from the hob makes you crawl with toxic sensations that made your legs buckle or smack you with an instant headache when you are standing close enough to stir the dinner. Where the full moon and geomagnetic storms only add to the load and trigger migraines the like of which you’ve never had before. Where electro-overwhelm affects your eyesight, causes electric-shock symptoms and electro-probing sensations in limbs, sets off muscle spasms and restless legs, causes teeth and ear pains, nerve pains to the head that are so severe you don’t know how you will cope with the intensity and nights when you toss and turn with an inside-out discomfort that feels as though you are being put through some sort of microwave. There were episodes where I stood under my electric power shower with the spotlights overhead and felt my legs become so quickly charged with electric current that it felt like a stun-gun chopping me off at the knees, with long-lasting pockets of paralysis occurring in muscle that meant I could no longer feel my calves or the ends of my feet. Times when the half numb, half electric tingling of those feet or fingers would still continue many hours later or felt like I had burning chilblains that came on with shock intensity then disappeared just as quickly. There was that memorable night spent in London when the highly charged city energy made the hotel room feel like it was strobing with electricity, where electric current felt like it was even riding the Victorian plumbing of our hotel room, meaning that I was like I was a cat on a hot tin roof for our whole stay, missing out on a four-poster bed to half-sleep myself to exhaustion in a chair by the window. Where, noticing the rattle and hum of the subterranean tube line directly beneath our feet over breakfast, I also observed how my legs were suddenly shot through with electric pain from the ground upwards as each of these electric trains rattled on through.

I could go on…but I won’t; suffice to say, there is a point when you grimly realise you are at one with the ever growing group of people who regard themselves to be obstructively electrosensitive and wonder how you are going to conduct your life from now on, in a world so wired up that its almost impossible to live in it without feeling it everywhere you go.

By the way, I had tried grounding myself — using one of those “plug in” earthing devices (mine was a blanket) that you connect to the earthing wire of your home. I slept with this for several weeks but this only seemed to make my symptoms far more pronounced in proportion to how much I used it, so much so that I found myself unearthing (excuse the pun) a whole subsection of articles (such as Is grounding good for you) suggesting that these are perhaps not such a good idea and, given my own experiences, I remained wary enough not to continue using mine. Maybe this was a foible of my own wiring, I considered; though my earth wire tested as perfectly sound. I began to have the kind of thoughts that led me to the conclusion that I might be living in a “sick house” as all my health problems had initiated within a year or so of moving into it…

Of course, the thing I most readily pointed my finger at, as many of us tend to do, was the wifi that is eating up all the airwaves around us and impossible to avoid…and yes, I noticed how I felt so much better when I switched it off at the router for many hours at a time and left it off until someone came home that really needed it on again. So when I called in an expert in this field to conduct a survey of my home, that — more than anything — was what I was expecting him to find; in other words, that the wifi invasion of my home by the five or more sources of our neighbours’ routers, whether or not mine was actually switched on, were what was primarily causing my hyper-sensitivity along with, maybe, a mobile phone mast, a smart metre or a substation nearby that I hadn’t taken account of.

That person was a consultant from a company called Geovital and I remained, let’s say, just a little sceptical when he came out to visit me in case his approach turned out to be an attempt to work on my fears and sell me a load of products that wouldn’t actually help. As it turned out, that was far from the case; Geovital-trained Leonard Stafford turned out to be a very affable, credible and informed “expert” on the subject and very genuine and eager to help my situation. He was with me for a huge portion of that day, long over his allotted appointment, during which he painstakingly worked with me through a full and thorough assessment of my environment (and my reactions to it) in search of whatever it was that may be prompting me to be so hypersensitive.

I won’t summarise that survey in the same painstaking detail here as that is not what I am wanting to share in this post today, which is much more of an overview of the personal conclusions I came to (though I will say that I am glad that I had the survey carried out as it was incredibly useful and empowering in my situation). What was so useful about having this survey done was that it got things into perspective and gave me some useful sound-bites of information that I could play with, going forwards, to make my circumstances better and take control of them for myself instead of playing the victim to them, as is absolutely key in any recovery scenario.

What was particularly useful was finding that by switching off the circuit board, room by room, I was able to reduce down the electricity load upon my body – while I sleep – from a very considerable measure that shocked me a little to zero once the whole circuit was all switched off. This took me aback as I had never considered how electricity was actually coursing through my body, as an extension of the household circuit, while I slept at night, which even a basic grasp of how we are energetic beings living in an energetic universe must allow anyone to see is potentially disruptive to the way we are “designed” to operate as energy in form. Why does household electricity, potentially, lead to health issues you may ask. Well, taken from ‘Geopathic stress – the ultimate guide‘: “Electric power systems work at around 50hz, just above the naturally occurring frequency of 30hz generated by the Earth. Our bodies are tuned in to this low frequency so any frequency close to this is going to interfere with us, such as the 50hz Ac mains power system used in the UK. ELF (Extremely Low Frequency) electromagnetic fields vibrating from 0.5 to 100hz, even if they are weaker than the Earth’s field, interfere with the cues that keep our biological cycles properly timed. Chronic stress and impaired disease resistance results.

We assessed the effect of this electric load upon me by measuring the actual effect each room-load of electricity supply was having on my body as I lay there on the bed, which was measured in microvolts. Starting with a measure of something like 1300 mV with my house as it normally was, all electricity switched on, we got this down to next to zero with just the essentials of boiler, fridge and smoke alarm left on and so I have slept like this for the past month and a half. This – and I exaggerate not — has been one of the single most transformative things I have EVER done for myself. My sleep quality has improved massively, the whole room feels completely different in ways that are extremely hard to describe (though my husband will testify to them being absolutely tangible as he has reaped all these benefits alongside me and declares he has never slept better ). The way I feel as I climb into that bed to sleep, and then wake up in the morning, has been utterly transformed…very, very different to any sleep state I can recall in this life but, I imagine, probably something like how it would have been to sleep under the stars in another lifetime. My dream quality is completely renewed too — so that I feel like I am “back in touch with myself” and waking with so many things resolved, with new inspiration hovering, so much more creativity waiting to be given expression, many urges to leap to it and start writing as soon as my eyes are open. Pain levels have been massively reduced, I’m feeling far less fatigued on waking, my limbs are less stiff and I am not generally feeling overwhelmed by heavy exhaustion before I’ve even started my day. All of this, just from switching off the electricity current to my bedroom and the immediate environment; who would have thought it was possible.

Perhaps my house was more difficult in this respect than others since it is one of the “rapid build” modern variety where the interior is constructed of timber frame and plaster board, behind which hang great spaghetti bundles of electric wires which, of course, aren’t of the shielded variety as there is no legislation stating that they must be (though, knowing what I now do, this seems like terrible oversight). Maybe an old Victorian house with proper brick walls, like my old one, would not have presented me with such a problem; who knows. Certainly, the wall nearest my side of the bed delivered one of the highest readings in the house when everything was switched on, being a central wall with — likely — many of the wires extending between upstairs and down dangling behind it and a large electrical box that fed the water heater fixed to it as well. With all this switched off, it was as though you could hear the silence that the house suddenly resonated with, like a level of calm that was immediately registered by all of my nerve fibres, allowing them to cease their static cling to the walls of my body shouting “get me out the here” and suddenly float like feathers on the breeze. One of the most interesting things to register was that, having gradually switched everything off in order to conduct these experiments, and then sat there talking for a while with the house in electro-quiet, I felt like electric worms were leaving my body, primarily out of the nerve endings of my face and head (a nerve-area that is especially sensitive and pain-triggered for me). When we switched the circuit board back on again, I could distinctly feel these “worms” returning like so many iron filings regrouping around the magnet of my head; the oddest, almost disturbing, experience but it taught me a lot about how not to take the “invisible” forces in our environment for granted.

The other thing that came out of the survey which I found particularly useful was that several energy lines (known as Hartmann, Curry and water lines – an article outlining these from Dr Mercola here) were found, through dowsing, beneath our bed, crossing over at the pillow area. These naturally occurring lines are found literally everywhere but the places where they cross over can produce an electromagnetic focal point that has been correlated with many health issues, even cancers, by those who have studied them and, interestingly enough, I had my own health story to tell about the exact spot where they crossed over in my room. Geovital were able to provide special mats to scramble these energies, that slide under the bed (once our bed was changed from being metal frame to wooden — another requirement to mitigate the electrical effects of our sleep-zone) and, while I was perhaps initially more cynical about these than anything else that came out of the survey, they have turned out to be the finishing touch that we could distinctly feel “working” straight away and I don’t believe this is just a placebo effect. Since adding those mats to our electricity free sleep-space, we both feel like we are floating on air and that our bodies are deeply relaxing and repairing over night in a way that was tangibly missing before. All this, without doing anything whatsoever to mitigate the “outside” sources of wifi in our environment; this was not the outcome I had expected at all.

If we had wanted to do anything about that wifi onslaught (which the survey confirmed was there, as expected…almost impossible to avoid wifi anywhere these days, especially in a built-up community) we could have taken this whole project to the next level and had our room painted with protective “shielding” paint, again manufactured by Geovital, which is extremely effective at keeping those radio-frequency waves out. However, the effects of simply mitigating the low-frequency sources of electricity and tweaking our sleeping space were so profound upon how we were feeling that it really didn’t feel necessary or even desirable to me to progress to this next step…in fact it felt down-right counter-intuitive for me to go there; and here’s why. What I didn’t want was to be sleeping in a sealed protective box every night; that, to me, felt something like volunteering to seal myself in some sort of lead box or a coffin, a self-created prison cell, and how would that equip me to sleep anywhere else but my own bed, how was this an integrated and “normal” way of living on this planet where there is almost no escaping this electro-reality short of living on a mountain top, hiding from the world. I wanted to get out and travel more, not less, over the next few years and how would creating an artificial safe-zone equip me to do that? I have experienced many times how, the more you protect yourself from something deemed undesirable, the more you then react to it when it is back in your experience range…and I didn’t want that; I wanted recovery to mean full integration back into my humanness, without limitations. To lock myself away from the current reality of this planet would be to make an enemy of the present-day living conditions on this planet and I wasn’t prepared to declare war in that way. I want the rebalancing of my health to mean I am fully equipped to lead a life that means I can say “yes” to any experience I choose without feeling compromised by my health and that means the kind of recovery where I feel truly robust, not maintaining some sort of fragile equilibrium by walking a knife’s blade of carefully managed circumstance. A recovery on those terms would feel conditional in so many ways and I am shooting for the fully unconditional variety!

So we opted to leave the room just as it was as far as shielding was concerned and to make the electrical arrangements permanent so that we can flip one switch near our bedroom to turn off all that is quite unnecessary when we sleep (needing only two of three things downstairs to remain operational) yet still reactivate the circuit instantly if, say, we needed to switch on a light in the night. This is being done shortly by an electrician using a switching box provide by Geovital and, in the meantime, we are achieving this state of electrical calm overnight the old fashioned way, using the fusebox and going to bed with a torch (which has been bizarrely entertaining, actually). I can’t adequately put into words the difference this has made to my sleep and my general health; a feeling of gaining huge traction in my recovery.

The difference between one level of mitigation and the other, in my case, feels like it is making these changes something I am benefitting from but not utterly reliant upon to survive; and I appreciate that I am fortunate enough to have found enough benefit from these changes to continue on with my life in a fairly “normal” way, which might not be the case for every electro-sensitive being. A big part of this is probably how much other work I have done to improve my health, including massive detoxification and diet improvement, all the lifestyle changes I have made and so on, even before reaching this stage.

What I am finding is that my tolerance of electricity during the daytime is now so much better, since my nighttimes have been completely reinvented, that I am using wifi a much more without consequence, am able to stand by the cooker preparing that meal without the immediate super-intense headache coming on, am no longer swooning with weakness under lights in shops or energetically floored in public spaces like was happening before; in fact, I went shopping for over three hours yesterday and came home more energised than I can remember in a very long time. Yes, I am using my technology more consciously than ever before (which is a good thing) — turning wifi off or using an ethernet connection when I can, no longer carrying a “live” phone in a pocket on my body, even on walks, keeping electric switches off when not in use — yet no longer painfully conscious of the sharp electric tingles coming through my fingers from the keyboard or when handling charging wires, which used to routinely “zim” me, no longer getting shocks off everything I touch or feeling constantly like that cat on a hot tin roof. My nerve pain has reduced enormously; episodes of excruciating pain in my head, around my trigomenal nerve and behind the eyes have become rarer and less intense. My whole body feels generally less electric or like it is no longer on high-alert when I am around an electrical source. How can this all be from making one small lifestyle adjustment?

So much of this feels like it has to do with sleep and the importance of melatonin in the regulation of the endocrine system (just look that up and you will see what I mean). When we are deprived of melatonin, our whole system goes into disarray and, when it comes to fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue, this can be one of the very roots of the problem as long-term suppression of melatonin production messes with everything, from pain receptors to hormone health. When our hormones get messed up (a territory I am more than familiar with…) everything else tends to follow and the symptoms can be as broad-reaching as they are often bizarre. Amongst other useful functions, melatonin inhibits the over-production of oestrogen, with outcomes that will make even more sense within the context of the oestrogen-dominance that is so rife amongst women of a “certain age”, including me. Melatonin has also been found to inhibit the proliferation of breast cancer cells (like it is some sort of built-in safeguard against that outcome) whereas electromagnetic fields can suppress that crucial melatonin production…you can see where this line of enquiry is going.

So this is also, probably, a good time to casually mention that menopause (by which I broadly refer to that whole peri-menopause-into-menopause time bundle during her forties and fifties when a woman’s hormones are on the shift) is a time when a woman’s electrical charge undergoes profound changes; ones which I tend to equate with a kundalini awakening trying to get underway. I was aware of this already in my own health journey; in fact, my very first super-intense “electrical” symptoms started to occur as nerve pains radiating from my lower spine, about a year ago, which still recur in sync with my hormone cycles and which are one of the first things to feel aggravated if I am feeling electrically challenged. These are so much more than a “hot flush” but they do feel intrinsically connected and, my take on these is, they are our own inbuilt launch procedure, poised to send us into orbit within our own lives so that we can start to enjoy a whole new expanded perspective upon our “little” human lives only, so often, they can feel much more like a symptom of crash-and-burn due to the profound state of overwhelm and stress that so many women find themselves in by the time menopause occurs. At the very point when our chakra “energy centres” should be lighting up with our own inner power source, then linking up like a colourful string of jewels, we can seemingly blow all our own fuses in the circuit board overload of our own lives. My personal choice is to hook into that power surge and ride with it, phoenix-like, not buckle to it or be consumed; but to do that I need to understand more about how it all works within “physical me”.

In a book I am currently immersed in, “Passage to power – Natural menopause revolution” (which thoroughly covers all these topics) Leslie Kenton explains how the bones hold an electric charge which can change profoundly when we reach the hormone shifts of menopause, which alters the whole cellular structure of our bones from the inside out. In a nutshell, more bone is often being absorbed than is being built, leaving more spaces in between. Bone is a crystal substance and the amount of stress this is put under affects the voltage of the electrical fields going through and hanging around those bones. In a healthy bone, more stress attracts the appropriate electricity charge to that bone to rebuild the bone structure (which is why weight-bearing exercise is so important to maintain through all of life) but bone density can take a hammering from lifestyle variables and is particularly governed by hormones; when oestrogen dominance is “happening” the electrical charge is very different to when bones are healthy and strong. We all know how bone density potentially deteriorates around menopause (mine was measured, by the very same Dr Shirley Bond of Harley Street referred to in this book, as having prematurely taken that turn for the worse over half a decade ago when I was still in my early forties…) but does it have to? Natural progesterone has been how I started to tackle my own bone-density loss as this has been shown not only to halt but to reverse the process of the kind of bone-density issues which are catalysed by…you’ve guessed it…oestrogen-dominance.

I know for a fact that (returned and newly intense) symptoms of oestrogen-dominance have been one of the most challenging, persistent and underlying issues of my health circumstances this last year, since peri-menopause started to gain a foothold, as a result of which I have been taking my – somewhat lapsed – application of natural progesterone cream even more seriously since the new year. That natural progesterone regime can take up to three months to settle into its groove and can actually make oestrogenic “symptoms” feel much worse for a short period of time while the body recalibrate…so is there any accident that this happened to coincide with my weirdest and most intense symptoms of electro-sensitivity? Maybe, just maybe.

Here’s my take on it; as far as I am concerned, menopause is meant to be a time of rising power in a woman’s life and it is just that a warped set of cultural beliefs around the topic have (temporarily) deprived her of this. What should be a time of, yes, increasing atunement to everything going on around us (in the most positive sense), manifesting as heightened awareness, enhanced intuitive skills, more conscious behaviour choices, a sense of being the first to know and the most in touch, of being uncannily adept at assessing situations and stepping into our very best circumstances “because we just know” which way to go…all of this have been turn-turtled into a period of time that the media and medical industries have made all about demise, illness, loss, fear and a sort of free-fall tumble into that thing they keep insisting on calling “old age”. Women are made to feel they are approaching the proverbial scrap heap at this time and so their super-sensitivity is turned around on them; quite literally, turned into the very thing that is making them “unwell”. Like a physical manifestation of the mere metaphor that this may otherwise sound like, we have the culturally pervasive trend of oestrogen-dominance (and if you want to know how this is so universally possible, read up about all the xenoestrogens – the man-made oestrogens, byproducts of our modern-day plastic world, that have been unleashed into our environment and which our bodies treat as the real McCoy). Throw in a certain amount of sleep deprivation because of the electro-magnetic sleep zones we call home and, voila, the balance is tipped in favour of electro-frying rather than highly tuned-in electric beings stepping into our own cosmic power source. For way too many people, this can mean tipping into overwhelm, bizarre symptoms, chronic pain, cancers and more.

In simplest terms, it is my speculation that oestrogen-dominance makes us more prone to “tuning in” to the electrical currents in our environment than ever before, then reacting to them as a super-sensitivity that becomes a chronic aggravant upon our central nervous system. Once we get into that loop, we get caught in a cycle of sleep-depravation, overwhelm, exhaustion, hormone disruption and, so, even more oestrogen dominance…round and around and (as I’ve noticed for myself) the more electro-magnetically sensitive we are, the more compulsively we seem to be drawn to those electro-magnetic habits, such as late-night technology usage when, really, we should be “switching off” and opening up to reconnecting with ourselves, repairing our cells and regenerating our bodies ready to face another day.

Knowing all this, experientially, is new empowerment. Knowing that the effects of the “modern” environment can be turned down a little, on demand, is also empowerment; putting us in charge rather than hiding away from it all. Choosing, for instance, whether to carry that action-ready phone all of the time (I now have mine on airplane mode unless I really need it), whether to keep wifi switched on every minute of night and day, where and how you spend your time…embracing all the options as choices (not foregone conclusions) is all about stepping into your own power, which is always the first step of any recovery process. Deep-diving into the whole culture that is growing around this thing called “electro-sensitivity”, which amounts to an actual fear of the same modern environment that is largely unavoidable, does not feel like empowerment. To do this would be to leave me nowhere to hide except “off grid”, which does not feel like it is part of the ever-expanding state of liberty I am welcoming into my world. Rather, I choose to believe that full integration of who I am with all aspects of life is possible and achievable, without the kind of compromising that means my world is made smaller and that I can never go to all those places on my wish-list. Adopting that very mindset, that approach, to my own sensitivity challenges (which isn’t to underestimate or deny them in any way as they have been considerable and often enormously alarming to experience) has been a huge step forwards in my own recovery from them as it leaves me standing firmly in my own power and not feeling like the helpless victim who is perpetually afraid of “something happening to me”. It establishes me as the one in the driving seat of my own experiences, which is the only place I ever intend to be.

So, as you can tell, a great deal has come out of my brush with electro-sensitivity (“great” being the key word that I chose to focus upon) and, though I’m not out of the woods yet, I feel far less daunted or out of my depth when peaks of experience still happen to me…and every day is getting markedly better. The very fact of being able to guarantee myself the best sleep of my life — pretty much every night — has been a big turning point for me and enables me to go off and sleep in other places where the same safeguards don’t exist in the same way we can allow ourselves that slice of sugary birthday cake or whatever else we don’t normally indulge in from time to time without feeling we will loose our footing, because most of the time I hold the benchmark of “normality” very steady for myself, out of respect for what my body needs to be optimised. Recognising what that optimum state looks like feels wonderful; experiencing it as the ever more “normal” sensations of my health feels even better. This all feels so empowering and, meanwhile, I have come to understand and respect so much more about my electric self. I could go on (and on) about how this has newly informed the way I meditate; the way (and reason why) I practice yoga and am intrigued by tai chi; the fact that energy modalities have long been the most useful of all the healing I have pursued; the relationship I have with my female-self and the deep inner wisdom relating to that which is now rising (much more comfortably) to the surface; the way I have opened up my awareness of others; of energy fields; of my complex and variable relationship with “space weather” and the moon; of how I operate in a world that is all about electric currents, if we could all but just see that (and, through extreme sensitivity to it, I have done just that). For we are all, fundamentally, electric beings existing in an electric universe and the gifts of really discovering this for myself have been exponential; meanwhile, I now sleep far better, more powerfully, than I ever did in my life. Deepest gratitude for the whole of this experience is truly mine.

For more on the benefits of Natural Progesterone Cream and a natural, empowering approach to menopause, I recommend Leslie Kenton’s book “Passage to power: Natural menopause revolution“
For home radiation and geopathic surveys (including a list of local consultants) plus related products – Geovital
For insight into how geopathic stress affects areas where we live and sleep, this link to an article by The Geomancy Group is a must-read
Brilliant article (and information, generally – including consultations regarding geopathic issues) on the Land and Spirit website
Geopathic stress – the ultimate guide – a brilliant comprehensive guide to all the different types of stress that might be affecting your living environment

For an update on the material in this article and the conclusions I continue to draw, please read my later post The oestrogen effect which adds a crucial new angle to the picture (how oestrogen both exposes and protects…)

Disclaimer: This blog provides personal, anecdotal information and discussion about medicine, health and related subjects. The words and other content provided in this blog, and in any linked materials, are not intended and should not be construed as medical advice or recommendation. If the reader has a medical concern or questions relating to the suitability of treatments referred to, he or she should seek professional medical advice.