Imagine you’re in your early 30s, you’re in a wheelchair, hallucinating, barely able to follow the doctor’s speech. It’s Friday. And he says,” You’re not going to make it until Monday.” That is today’s guest, Cherie Kephart. A mysterious illness led to years of suffering, during which her symptoms again and again were undiagnosed and misdiagnosed. For many years, Cherie dealt with relentless pain and the anguish of not knowing what was causing it. She shares important lessons the painful experiences taught her about the point of suffering, the meaning of forgiveness, and the importance of stopping, noticing and recalibrating when life moves too fast, among others.

You can listen to the full conversation by clicking ‘play’ below, or on the following podcast platforms:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Google Play
• Stitcher

If You Can’t Believe It, Then It Probably Won’t Happen

The following is just a tiny taste of Cherie’s remarkable insights.

Q: What’s the point of suffering?
Cherie: The big lesson suffering taught me was that I needed to slow down and pay attention.

Q: What eventually led to your healing?
Cherie: Believing it would happen was one of my first steps in healing. If you can’t believe it, then it probably won’t happen.

Q: What does forgiveness mean?
Cherie: The freedom to move on.

Q: You’re on a healing path. Does that mean you were broken?
Cherie: No. In the midst of my suffering, I felt broken. But in retrospect, I experienced something that propelled me into the beautiful life I live now, that I don’t think I would have gotten without it. And I’m still on the healing path, recognizing that I’m not broken. That I am whole and complete.

When I ask if there’s one last thing she’d like our listeners to hear, Cherie says, “Don’t let fear drive you. Put fear in the back seat. Put it in the trunk. Strap it to the roof. Don’t let it drive you. It will be with you. But you have a choice what you do with your fears.”

Cherie Kephart is the award-winning author of A Few Minor Adjustments: A Memoir of Healing, an inspirational story of one person’s persistence to find healing.

About Cherie Kephart
Raised in Venice, California, Cherie longed to travel and experience the way other people lived. After serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Zambia on a water sanitation and health education project, Cherie returned to the United States with an African souvenir she didn’t expect: a mysterious illness. She fell severely ill and almost died, leaving her with symptoms that went undiagnosed for many years. This inspired Cherie to write her memoir, A Few Minor Adjustments: A Memoir of Healing, taking the reader on a powerful but entertaining journey through her adventures and search for life-saving answers.

Find Cherie on Social Media: CherieKephart.com Facebook Instagram: @CherieKephartwriter Goodreads Cherie’s Books:

• A Few Minor Adjustments: A Memoir of Healing
• The Healing 100: A Practical Guide to Transforming Your Body, Mind, and Spirit
• Poetry of Peace

Books Mentioned in the Interview: Fierce Joy, by Susie Rinehart Love Is Complicated: A True Story of Brokenness and Healing, by Marlena Fiol, now available for pre-order on Amazon.

About Marlena Fiol, PhD
Marlena Fiol, PhD, is a globally recognized author, scholar and speaker. She is a spiritual seeker whose work explores the depths of who we are and what’s possible in our lives. Her significant body of publications on the topic, coupled with her own raw identity-changing experiences, makes her uniquely qualified to write about personal transformational change. She is also a certified tai chi instructor and freelance writer whose most recent work has appeared in numerous literary magazines and newsletters. You can find Marlena in the following places: https://marlenafiol.com Facebook Twitter: @marlenafiol

Podcast Transcript
Below is a complete transcript of the podcast. I used a transcription service to create this, please note that there may be errors. For a 100% accurate quote of what was said, please listen to the podcast itself via the links above. Cherie is the award-winning author of A Few Minor Adjustments: A Memoir of Healing, an inspirational story of one person’s persistence to find healing. A mysterious illness at a young age led to years of suffering, during which her symptoms again and again were undiagnosed and misdiagnosed. For many years, Cherie dealt with relentless pain and the anguish of not knowing what was causing it. So…the theme running through all of our episodes for this podcast season is that going through adversity sometimes leads us to more fully understand who we truly are and what’s possible for us. Cherie’s incredible journey to find life-saving answers certainly fits this theme. Welcome, Cherie, to our podcast Becoming Who You Truly Are. PEACE CORPS So…your journey of mysterious illnesses really began when you were in the Peace Corps in Africa back in 1994…is that right? Maggots. Malaria. S: I was 23 when I joined the Peace Corps in Zambia. I went to change the world, but as is so often the case, the change was within me. I took all of the precautions and the preventions, but yes, a lot of illness started there. DIAGNOSES Your list of symptoms kept growing for six months in 2004: neuropathy, numbness, stomach pain, chest tightening, foot cramps, and vertigo. What were the various diagnoses you received from the medical community? (Six fertile chicken eggs?) For 7 years I was bounced around from one specialist to another and kept getting “We can’t help you.” One finally gets desperate. So I heard of a healer and went. He was a Russian ex-physicist with a heavy accent who lived in a dingy apartment in Hollywood. He commanded me to find six fertile eggs to treat my racing heart rate – it would get up to 195/bpm while resting, which is dangerous. SUFFERING Cherie, at one point in the book, you ask what’s the point of suffering (p. 167). The theme of this podcast is that the point of suffering sometimes may be that it allows us to know more deeply who we truly are and what’s possible for us. What have you learned about yourself over the years, and how has your suffering impacted that learning? S: As we know from many spiritual traditions, suffering is optional. I chose a hard path of suffering – I mean I didn’t go out there looking for it – but I wasn’t paying attention. The big lesson was that I needed to slow down and pay attention. I thought I could just bulldoze my way through running marathons, working too much… I would smell the roses, but I would smell them really fast. And I wasn’t really truly present. So this was my biggest lesson because it stopped me. I don’t think I would have stopped moving if I hadn’t gotten such a severe stop sign. At one point I was bed-ridden and being spoon fed to stay alive. I couldn’t watch TV, I couldn’t read a book, I couldn’t hold my head up. All I could do all day was to stare out the window and watch the trees, and be with my pain, and just hope one day I’d figure out what was to happen. So the point of it all is that I had to stop looking outside of myself, and I started looking inside. WHAT LED TO YOUR HEALING? Cherie, you write that it was not one thing but hundreds of things that led to your healing. Looking back now, can you tell our listeners, what were the things most critical to your healing? S: Big question. One was going within. I keep thinking about the word hope. And having a lot of hope can be a good thing. But a hope is a wanting and a yearning outside of ourselves. So when we switch from that frequency to belief – I started believing even though I was in tremendous pain. I would scream all day long, just hoping for something to happen. I had to switch to OK one day, I don’t know how it’s going to happen, but one day in the future I’m going to be over this. And there will be a moment when I look back and reflect and be in a different space. So I started cultivating that belief. And that was one of my first steps in healing. If you can’t believe it, than it probably won’t happen. So I used to run marathons, and I used to train people to run marathons. And I would help them visualize – we’d go through the whole 26 miles, and at the end they would get past the finish line, get the medal, and every one of those people came to me later and said, “Because you had me do that exercise, I knew when I was running that I would finish. Because my brain knew – it had already experienced that. So I started applying that to my healing. That was the first crucial step for me in my healing: believing. And profound trust. You don’t just say you believe it. You actually trust that you’re on that trajectory making it happen. MUCH MORE THAN A DIAGNOSIS Cherie, on your website (I think) you state, “In the end, I found much more than a diagnosis.” Can you comment on that? NEED FOR TOUGH EXTERIOR Cherie, you write that you always relied on travel or vocation to protect yourself from yourself – when the illness paralyzed you and you could no longer prove your worth, you desperately needed to show the world you were tough and capable until you found a new inner strength. I would love for you to read Fierce Joy by Susie Rinehart, whom I’m also interviewing for this podcast. She had a very similar experience. So…can you describe for our listeners what that experience was like of being stripped of that tough exterior? Did you move through the phases of grief and loss – such as anger, betrayal, bargaining…? S: It was a kaleidoscope of emotions daily. Every day I would ride the waves of anger, and frustration and shame and fear and I would keep riding them. One day I had a breakthrough when I was taken in an ambulance – did that many times – ha d moment realized I was fighting my illness and I was fighting to get back to who I used to be. As opposed to allowing who I was trying to become, and when I realized that, and realized I was close to dying. On a Friday, a rheumatologist said I wasn’t going to make it until Monday. I was in a wheelchair, I was hallucinating, I could barely follow his speech, and I knew I was on my way out finally. I thought, I can let go of the fear. I’m dying anyway. The fear’s going to be there anyway. I don’t need it. And let me just see if I set that aside. I set it aside and went inside and felt instant relief. And I thought: Ah, there it is. I don’t need to fight. I don’t need to hold onto who I was. I don’t need to do any of this anymore. I can just really relax into where I am in this life, and that’s when my healing started. M: Is it easier to let go of fear as you’ve described in a moment of crisis than after the crisis is past? S: Absolutely. So when we’re in a crisis, there’s a lot of pressure, so you have a sense of fear and doom and you either succumb to it or you can overcome it. And that’s what I felt, but you have that pressure. You don’t have time to worry about the bills that aren’t paid or the clutter in your house, or racing out to get your son to soccer practice, or someone nicked your car in the parking lot – nothing else matters. This is it. So what happens is that as you start to heal, and I’m still on that healing path, then you start getting back into the norms of how we function in society. So without that pressure to remind you to be grateful, to remind you to “Oh my God, look at this lemon. It tastes so amazing.” We just start taking the lemon for granted. So for me, the trick is every day without feeling that pressure in my life – because I don’t want that pressure in my life – to enjoy and be grateful for everything every day of my life. FORGIVENESS When the man from the detox center who abused you apologized, your therapist said, “There’s no apology that could ever make right what he did to you. Perhaps over time you can forgive him.” What does forgiveness mean for you today? C: Forgiveness means to allow myself to move on. As we know, it doesn’t condone someone else’s behavior. It doesn’t have anything to do with forgetting. It has everything to do with creating a safe space for us to know that we’re all human, we all make mistakes, some do really bad things, and some people have the ability to recognize that, to allow that light and love for individuals who have harmed us. And that’s only going to benefit them and us. If we hold onto anything, then we are just cheating ourselves and robbing ourselves of our future, our ability to be free. So for me it’s about freedom and letting them go too. Even the worst atrocities. Everyone at one time was a baby, an innocent child, and for whatever circumstance they got to where they got to. So I like to forgive them, really and truly in my heart, and move on, and that frees me and them. Hopefully they can rehabilitate themselves and change. So for me it’s freedom. SPIRITUALITY Cherie, when you began to see Dr. Universe, you write that your spirituality blossomed, believing that the existence of a universal energy connects all beings. Can you speak more about spirituality and what it means to you today? C: She’s a dear friend. She is one of the ones that changed my life. Without her, I would not be where I am in the healing process. And when I say healing, I don’t ever mean that I was broken. When I say healing, it’s about transformation, or healing from a place we used to be to a beautiful new place. So my spiritual journey is still about that. It’s about transformation. It’s about growing. It’s about not needing the pressures of crisis, but in a perfect moment in life when I’m feeling good and everything is going well, I’ll pursue growth. How can I stretch myself? How can I see things differently? How can I see someone who’s harmed someone else and send them love? For me, it comes down to love. Everything in the universe is made up of energy, and the purest energy is love. So if I can live my life from pure love, then I am on this spiritual path. Every decision I make is “Did I do that with pure love?” M: Not broken? C: The distinction for me is, when I was going through it, I thought I was broken. But now I understand I wasn’t. It was like the caterpillar turning into a butterfly. The caterpillar is not broken when it’s in its metamorphosis. It is actually transforming. So that’s the same thing. We feel broken. And if you look at us from the outside, it looks like our life is shattered. But for me, I wasn’t broken. I experienced something that propelled me into the beautiful life I live now, that I don’t think I would have gotten to without it. And I’m still on the healing path, recognizing that I’m not broken, that I am whole. I am complete. M: How did writing this book impact your healing journey? C: I believe we write everything twice, especially with memoir writing. We write it first to heal ourselves. It’s a cathartic effort. And we learn so much and we go through so much. When we set it aside and go through the long process of editing, then we make a separation and say, now this is for the world. How I learned that . I began writing this book when I was in hospital rooms, when I was getting IVs, when I was in bed, in doctors’ offices because I was still sick when I started writing it. As a writer, I wanted to write the book I wanted to read, and I couldn’t find one about someone who was undiagnosed. So there I was writing, hoping to heal myself and others, and I wrote the book and I put it aside for six months and went back and read it, and it was so depressing. And I thought, there’s no way anyone’s going to want to read this book. So I went down to the beach (San Diego). I hobbled down, I sat in the sand. I put the book in a fire pit and I burned it. And I let it go. And I thought, I don’t want to live in my illness. I don’t want to stay in the past. I’m moving on. And that’s what I did. So for about a year, I just completely focused on my healing. I thought the book had helped me heal and I was moving on. People asked me what was going on with my book, and I told them. After a year, a friend asked me about it and I told him and he asked if I’d ever read “Larry’s Kidney?” That’s all he said. The book showed up on my doorstep. It’s a controversial and grave topic told with humor. I got it. I think humor heals. So I went back and re-wrote the book with touches of humor. Even the title used to be “Undiagnosed,” and now it’s “A Few Minor Adjustments.” And I thought, this is it. Now I’m writing for the world. This is my gift to them. It’s no longer about my healing. It’s about what I can offer. BELONGING TO GREATER GOOD AND WISHING TO DIE You write that during the times of illness, you experienced a sense of belonging to a greater good – especially in Africa. But there were other times when you prayed for death. Those are stark contrasts. Can you comment on those experiences? C: My life has been a lot about extremes. And I would say on reflection that my illness was that way too. I would have the high highs of feeling the connection and seeing the beauty of being alive, and I would see the depths of darkness of wanting to commit suicide, can’t handle another moment, being engulfed in darkness. So for me it was a roller coaster of feelings and emotions that kept going through these big cycles. And I kept choosing not to get off the ride, almost welcoming it without knowing, because I was thought it felt so grand in those beautiful moments. But with that you also feel the darkness. So I came over time to embrace the beauty of being in this calm serene state. So I don’t have so much of the highs and lows anymore. I feel more acceptance that it’s all beautiful, that the darkness isn’t negative. It’s just another part on the scale, so I had the extreme circumstances of trauma, but also seeing the extreme beauty. But I found that I was actually out of balance. The balance is feeling all that but not riding those waves. M: What do you do when you lose that balance? C: First, I’m grateful if I notice. If I’m noticing, I’m not too far out of balance. It’s when I’m not noticing that I’m probably really off. So I take time every day to check in with myself. I meditate. I spend quiet time in nature. I think for me, having space in my life. Because without space, we go from one thing to the next, into the next, into the next. So creating space between activities, even if it’s 5 minutes, checking in. Am I holding my breath? Am I moving too fast? Time to recalibrate. NEXT BOOK You’re now writing a book of recipes for people who can eat nothing, is that right? I look forward to seeing it! C: “The Cookbook for People Who Can’t Eat Anything.” Delicious recipes that nourish your whole being. I love food, but with my health challenges, I had a lot of restrictions. I lost the joy for eating and cooking. I don’t care. Sad. Know there are others. So decided to write the book I would like to read. So I wrote it for people like me. I don’t eat dairy, gluten, soy, sugar, caffeine, alcohol. Affirmation with each recipe. Gratitude. Love. Joy. What’s beautiful about cooking and food even with health challenges. Put out to the universe. Bring me someone to help in January – in two months. In January took a gluten-free cooking class. He agreed to join me. So now he’s a coauthor. I manifest. I put it out there and I believe. And I’m not too picky. I didn’t ask for a 30-year old with certain experiences. I needed help but I was open to what showed up. And it was perfect. I think the universe knows what we need more than we do. If we’re open and not too specific, we’ll probably get a better deal than if we’d asked for it. LAST THING Cherie, if there were one last thing you’d like our listeners to know, what would it be? C: Don’t let fears drive you. Fear is a beautiful emotion and part of our life that can help us. Put fear in the back seat. Put it in the trunk. Strap it to the roof. Don’t let it drive you. It will be with you. But you have a choice what you do with your fears. I never say we should face our fears. We need to befriend our fears, because the darkness has the ability to transform. I’ve been speaking with Cherie Kephart, author of A Few Minor Adjustments: A Memoir of Healing. Details about how to purchase the book can be found on the show notes.