Dawn Lester | What Really Makes You Ill? Breaking Through the Shamanic Healing Crisis
Dawn Lester, researcher and author about the connections between consciousness & health, joins InnerVerse for a free-flowing conversation, wherein we discuss the importance of her book, What Really Makes You Ill, and the inspiration behind it, how a healing crisis set Dawn on her spiritual path, alternate interpretations of major illnesses, the flawed nature of prevailing disease theories, ancestral rivers and potential biofield transits with world events, and breaking victimhood mindsets.
In the Plus+ Extension, we talk about the demonization of the Sun, transcending resistance to emotions, why diagnosis labels are antithetical to health, how to attend to the body's message within discomfort, possibilities of weather warfare, whether or not reality is an illusion, humours and internal/external waters, and what to make of the secret spells in the word magic of English. All that and more!
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In this episode
Core themes
An 800-Page Book That Landed in December 2019
Lester describes how What Really Makes You Ill? Why Everything You Thought You Knew About Disease Is Wrong grew out of a course she and co-author David Parker were running on the nature of reality, until the health section kept expanding into an almost 800 page tome with pages of references. They briefly considered splitting it into two smaller volumes, then kept it whole so readers could reach the second part on vested interests. Neither author has a medical background, which Lester frames as an advantage: no biases to overcome. Publication landed weeks before 2020, timing she calls divine guidance.
Reiki, a Reality Course, and a Mid-Nineties Wake-Up Call
Lester traces her path from a childhood spent at the window wondering about eternity, through years of reading she now reads as escapism, to a mid-1990s diagnosis she carefully calls the C word. She says she was frustrated and unhappy at the time, never fully committed to the system's authority, and knew the answer had something to do with mindset. Changes followed: leaving a marriage, a local center, a reiki class that immediately drew her in, and David's course, parts of which felt like something she already knew. Garton hears the shape of a shamanic healing crisis, a hero's journey with information brought back for the tribe.
The Case Lester Makes Against the Disease Model
Lester argues that labels turn processes into things, that a symptom in one part need not mean anything is wrong with that part, and that the body drifts around homeostasis rather than sitting inside a narrow band. She calls the lab's normal range arbitrary, notes that blood pressure readings run high because people are nervous, and points to Bruce Lipton's work for the claim that genes do not control biology. She mentions German New Medicine and the asbestos and mesothelioma link without treating either as a total answer. Garton's outro reports her Substack citations: Leverson's 1911 London lecture, Bailey's 1928 London Medical World article, Stefan Lanka, and Virus Mania.
The Ancestral River and a Client Half a World Away
Garton walks through a recent biofield tuning with a New Zealand client whose digestive blockages triggered a racing heart. He was pulled instead to the crown chakra and the zone he calls the ancestral river, where he read a paternal grandmother raising small children in poverty and fear. The client confirmed a grandmother in London through World War Two, husband away, bombs overhead. Because stuck energy sits further from the body the older it is, roughly ten inches out, maternal on the left and paternal on the right, he floats a theory that the 2020 to 2022 charge transited that river. Lester calls it worth investigating.
Fear, Word Magic, and Where to Find Dawn
The through line Lester names for two years of writing at dawnlester.substack.com, titled Dawn's Writings, is helping people come away from fear that is unnecessary, since frightened people stop thinking. Both speakers turn to language: Garton notes that screen once meant separating the worthless from the valuable, from the Latin cerno, and that a victim is literally a living being sacrificed to a deity, with the state as the modern deity. Lester's answer to division is conversation without any need to convince. Garton's outro draws a parallel he sees between germ fear and climate fear, two invisible boogeymen. Lester was headed to Music and Sky as a speaker.
Quotes
“You shouldn't have to put the word real in front of science, but I think more and more of us are realising that it's become scientism.”
“You guys are probably the poster children for why there were articles coming out during cooties that said why it's not safe to do your own research.”
“And to be able to take the control back is very empowering. It does require responsibility as well.”
“That's the whole problem with reductionism in general is trying to boil everything down to almost programming code of if this, then that.”
“They have a set of results that they call the normal range. And that's arbitrary. There is nobody in the world who is normal.”
“The original meaning of the word screen is to separate the worthless from the valuable.”
“We are influenced by everything. We're connected to everything. We are all absolutely interconnected and we are individual and interconnected at the same time.”
“The invisible boogeyman is changing the climate. The invisible boogeyman is spreading the germ. Do you see the similarity here?”
Dawn Lester is co-author (with David Parker) of What Really Makes You Ill?, which challenges conventional germ-theory explanations of disease; on InnerVerse she discussed alternative theories of illness and the consciousness dimensions of a healing crisis.
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