but San Pedro can also heal very physical problems. One person La Gringa treated, for example, was a woman whose husband had died a few years before. Then, just three months later, her son was murdered. She was shattered. Her world fell apart and she had a stroke which paralysed her arm and led to the onset of diabetes.
After ineffective treatments from doctors in South Africa, where she lived, she decided to try San Pedro. “I gave her the tiniest amount”, says La Gringa, “then she lay in my arms and cried her heart out for five hours. That is a good description of what happened actually, because, through the eyes of San Pedro, I saw strands of energy coming from her heart and circling her arm like a tourniquet. I began pulling them out and throwing them away.
“The next morning there was a miracle. Her arm had regained all movement and, when she was tested, her diabetes had gone too. I asked her later about her San Pedro experience and she said she had felt a lot of pain in her heart, which is where I had seen the energy of grief that was binding her. So as well as curing her physical problems San Pedro showed her why she had them: because of the emotional distress she had been unable to let go of.
“What I learned through this is that illness is not a ‘thing’ that is in us; it is not ‘diabetes’ or ‘a stroke’; it is a belief we carry: that we must mourn for those we have lost, for example – or for ourselves – through pain or disability that makes our suffering visible. Illness is a thoughtform; a negative pattern we hold on to. San Pedro shows us this thoughtform; then, the next time it arises, we can make a conscious choice to think and act differently.”
Another example is