The Vision Quest Saved My Life – Physically
Bill Howard
2/15/21
When we talk about the Vision Quest, we speak of the miracles of change on a spiritual level. We tell the stories of great awakenings and knowings. We talk about how we come back changed, but we don’t know exactly how we are changed, we just know we are different.
Well, I’ll warn you now, this isn’t one of those stories. This story is about how the Quest saved my life, physically. To tell the story I have to give you some background.
From early childhood I have always been a very active person. My family worked from dawn until after dark to improve our little patch of land. As I grew, I was involved in sports. In adulthood I spent 12 years in the Marine Corps, four years from age 18 to 22 and then eight
more years after I was 40 years old.
Then, around 50 years old everything changed. My energy tanked; I couldn’t even workout anymore. I believed my life was over and that this was what it meant to get older.
By this point, I was already a Protector and I decided to offer a quest. To prepare for the quest I needed to ensure the land was suitable, so I decided to quest in preparation.
On the third night of the quest, I woke up staggering. It was a cold Easter weekend and I hypothesized that maybe I had buried myself too deep in my sleeping bag and was suffering from slight oxygen deprivation. “Oh well, I’ll be alright,” I thought.
The next morning I shook myself out of the sleeping bag and prepared for day four. “Uh oh, something’s wrong.” I was staggering drunk. I couldn’t have guzzled a fifth of liquor and been any more drunk. “What the hell is in my water?”
My bull-headed determination kicked in: “I’m not leaving, it’s just 24 more hours.”
I found a walking stick and staggered/stumbled down the steep hill to my marker box. By the time I got there I knew I had to leave. My quest was over.
I stumbled my way back to my vehicle. I was only able to walk 10 yards, and then I would have to kneel down. I couldn’t look up because everything was spinning. After an hour, I finally completed the half mile odyssey to my vehicle and collapsed.
It took several weeks of investigating and seeing doctors, but finally, a holistic healer told me what had happened. I was suffering from the first die-off of Candida Yeast Overgrowth and it had poisoned my system. You see, by fasting, I had deprived the yeast of the sugars
they needed to live. As the yeast died, it released a lot of toxins into my system.
The interesting thing about a yeast overgrowth is that it turns your body into a brewery. They actually take all the sugars you consume and turn them into 78 different kinds of alcohols and aldehydes. I was walking around hungover all the time and I wasn’t even drinking. It
had started without me knowing, after a normal round of antibiotics killed the bacteria in my gut.
Once we found out what had happened, we treated it with a three-month carbohydrate restricted diet. This killed off the rest of the candida by starving it without starving me.
Now I’m back to my old energetic self. I can go like the Energizer Bunny.
So you see, the Quest saved my life, or should I say, it gave me my life back.