Once upon a time a young girl, with long brown hair and a sensitive spirit, spent her days rambling in the woods, building faerie houses and collecting mica chips as glittering bits to add to her secret moss garden nestled under an old hemlock. This lanky tomboy climbed high up into the grand wolf pines, gazing over the land like a Native American scout. She nursed abandoned, wounded bunnies and lost cats, and by 13 years old, astride her pinto pony Circus Boy, this growing girl decided she wanted to be a doctor when she grew up – most specifically, an endocrinologist, as biology class had piqued her fascination with the symphony chords of these tiny glands.
The awkward young swan who moved with a natural athleticism, gravitated to the rarified air of the Vermont mountains, trekking to high altitudes in her summers, and she volunteered as a candy striper and nurse’s aid every Saturday throughout her high school years at North Shore Community Hospital. By the time she entered Duke University as a pre-med student, her heart was cemented as a healer.
But medicine in the mid-1970s ended up being a stern, clinical, non-congenial atmosphere for the sensitive healer, and after three years working in glaucoma research and in hospital wards, the drive to become a medical physician was stymied, as planted behind a clipboard and doling drugs did not resonate with the compassion she felt for those who suffered, and the medicines felt nothing like her flora friends from the woodlands and meadows she grew up with. So she abandoned medical school.
Adrift on Wall St and unmoored with her lamplight of healing ways misplaced, this young woman serendipitously discovered an ancient healing art called Homeopathy at age 23. From sentence one she knew this was where her talents could take root. Good fortune placed her at the knees of the two greatest practicing homeopaths of the Western world – Dr. George Vithoulkas from Greece and Dr. Fracesco Eiyzaga from Argentina. She studied with these masters and other greats for many years, bringing her innate healing energy, sharp mind, and keen intuition to razor-fine placement.
Katina Irene Makris thrived for two decades as a Classical Homeopath in a small NH hamlet, sat on the board of the Council of Homeopathic Certification for seven years, helping write the national exam, and sustained a burgeoning private practice in partnerships with other medical professionals. She had met her life’s purpose – ministering to those who were unwell and needing to heal. Her reputation stretched throughout New England.
Then, a on sparkling summer day in 2000, this new mother, living a holistic life of decades, fell deeply and mysteriously ill, with profound fatigue, neck pains, searing migraines, collapse, vertigo, and no real diagnosis. Six months later, she was told she had chronic fatigue syndrome. One year later, an anxiety disorder and excruciating meningitis style migraine complex. Eventually, she had foot drop, IBS, fibromyalgia, pericarditis and by year four was 100% bedridden. No one could heal the born healer. Only her treasured homeopathic remedies and acupuncture treatments enabled her to find windows of pain relief or a few nights’ sleep.
By the fifth year, she was bedridden, financially, spiritually, and emotionally broken, divorced and near death. Then, a miracle occurred after many tearful years in isolation and depression. A savvy clinical nutritionist PhD colleague used specialty labs (Igenex and Bowen) to isolate a long-festering case of advanced neurological Lyme disease.
To receive a valid diagnosis was a light in a cavernous, pitch-dark tunnel, and yet how to heal? Five years of antimicrobial herbals, nutritional supplements, homeopathics, acupuncture, rife technology, spiritual healing and personal lifestyle changes enabled Katina to heal and reclaim her life. The return from the underworld of advanced misdiagnosed Lyme disease back to the light of the living, akin to Persephone, was profound. So much so that she wrote a book of inspiration, giving voice to the inner life of a Lyme victim.
Katina had lost everything we strive for in the “American Dream:” home, marriage, savings, health, career, family, community, self-confidence; and yet she held onto something very precious: her life’s calling to bring healing and nurturance to others. In the darkest hours, curled like a wounded animal, sleet tapping on the roof, she prayed for help and healing. Slowly, she rebuilt her body, mind, and spirit. She survived the trial, the tempest, the call of death.
Today, the world knows Katina Makris as the author of “Out of the Woods:Healing Lyme Disease, Body, Mind & Spirit”, her next book “Autoimmune Illness and Lyme Disease Recovery Guide, Mending the Body, Mind & Spirit”, and her fall 2019 release “Loving Yourself Enough to Live”, as well as host of the cutting-edge radio program “Lyme Light Radio,” and perhaps the most inspirational speaker you could meet when it comes to resiliency and passion for overcoming a full life catastrophe as well as motivation on ending the Lyme disease epidemic. She has presented over 209 live presentations and workshops in 8 years, nationally and internationally.
And, underneath the surface, this dynamic woman, who captivated us with a stunning radio interview or an evocative rally speech, has the tender soul of a healer. That same spirit who ministered to foster animals and countless toddlers with ear infections now brings her heartfelt compassion to the enormous stage of the COVID 19 crisis and all those suffering with personal adversity.
I tell you this story about myself for a reason. I am living a life I could never have imagined and I take it all in with deep gratitude, true pride, and honest commitment.
Our society is struggling in dire ways. Infectious and autoimmune diseases are everywhere and have maimed generations. Not everyone recovers the way I so blessedly did. My life’s purpose has become much bigger than me. I am being “led” to foster change, to put voice and power together with wisdom and experience to ignite all the right forces to come together – to work together like that delicately balanced endocrine system orchestration – to crack the cross-over components of illnesses and syndromes, and to ammend the endless emotional and spiritual suffering of a world in need.
Time is not on our side. We are working at grassroots and global levels to address the Coronavirus pandemic. This is good, and we need more states, the Federal Government, and a unification amongst all health care capacities to step up to the plate.
As the world turns now in the confusions and contortions of the swift moving Covid 19 pandemic I have been recruited as an author, speaker and podcast host in a broad reaching critical online community venue of ENORMOUS REACH (20 million in China, 10 million in USA & counting in each continent) , fostered by the vision of a global visionary and humanitarian Matthew Casto and strategist Wayne Pettigrew to create connection, community, resource and understanding in an online capacity of how we cope and grow within the extended quarantines and lockdown isolationism of this sure crisis.
The Global Human Connection, launching the week of May 11,2020 is profound work we are doing. I walk this road with you all, hand in hand. May we find the diagnosis, the research, and the cures for this organism, and may the wounded spirits find love and light and rebirth in our efforts. May the talents and passions of these authors and hands on committed individuals foster an ongoing forum and community for us to share our caring, insights and palpably growing online family with a world in sequestered and sometimes harrowing need .
Through the darkest of times of suffering and trauma, we humans face the dichotomy of death and rebirth. This is nature’s order both clinically with pandemics and at a societal and personal levels Invoke transformation, old structures and systems sadly will crumble and die, as they needs or 40-60 years ago and not the accelerated over externalized rapid multi tasking hamster wheel of recent 20 years with the electronic kingdom yanking us of all ages everywhere, are now different.
For our human needs to ground, nurture an inner life, relate with compassion and cooperation, to slow down and rebalance our duality of an inner and external fulcrum of mankind’s yin and yang fulcrum: receptivity and fertility of creation with the drive to achieve, protect and build are up for current examination.
As hard as this shocking, serious illness is, layered over my years of working with holistic health and lifestyle, the advent of this super bug does not surprise me in some ways. But, we must heed its virility and rapidly learn to adjust to self care, slowed down paces, home & family time, feeding the soul in human simplicity, not the opulent excessives of post WW2 and a relatively graced and luxuriously epidemic free germ warfare in the western world since polio.
We are being tested, personally, professionally and socio-economically. Self reflection, adaptivity, technology, our creative youth and patience will guide us forward in the year and two to come .
But, now I introduce you to the profoundly important and nurturing work of the Global Human Connection project.
Please watch my media feeds, Blogs, emails, and announcements in the next weeks – we are moving quickly to lift this off the ground rapidly – all of the world needs this support.
15 stories and hard earned lessons will be shared in short essays, on line and radio, tv interviews about isolation, parenting tumult, sudden online schooling, Financial shock, kids in flux , relationships fraying, and how to remain healthy (body, mind & spirit) when daily exercise facilities, food shortages, drs offices closed ( not mine ❤️, Been virtual for 7 years) ? Yet, I believe in our youth & the beauty of great scientists working in union.
So, check out the Global Human Collective site launching now & join a forum to truly open your patterning of old ways, in order to grow and succeed in the transformational spectrum of Coronavirus and our eventually more healthily paced new world order / lead by our tech savvy innovative youth .
I’m deeply honored to be one of the 15 authors bringing pathways forward for us all; united with athletes, celebrities, business leaders, artists, authors, students and health care minds from Iran, Italy, Brazil, Africa , USA, UK, China and more . Watch for more on our weekly presentations, writings, interviews, quotes, self help, global community unification and just pure LOVE.. after all
This emotion and motivator unites everyone of us. It is the glue we need after recent decades of over self focus from the infinitesimal to massive governmental and big business greed
Namaste,
Katina I. Makris, CCH, CIH
http://www.KatinaMakris.com
http://www.TheGreatHumanConnection.com
PS. Please contact me here if you want to participate, have questions and want to
Get on our weekly inspirational information and practicality advice from Stir crazy, to juggling remote work & home schooling, Health needs, financial sorting, fraying mental health, aging parents and Just life with so drastically less human connection, affection, socialization .
This charity based foundation is for us all – sponsors are needed, the writers and professionals working gratis to foster compassion and balancing our rather shattered former known structures.
We will rebirth with a western society of deepening healthier values and more streamlined systems . I have faith in our resilience and talents.
Katina Makris, CCH, CIH
As 2016 christened us, with swaying palm fronds and a thronging life beat on the streets of vibrant Miami encircling, my breath caught with a faint sense of ‘something’ taking place internally that I could not quite find a word for or even frankly taste a grasp of reality for. Something was afoot, yet I couldn’t tell quite what? I allowed myself the grace to just trust and see. It was a mysterious calling.
David Roth is Co-Chairman of the Board of the New York-based Tick-Borne Disease Alliance TBDA. After being diagnosed with Lyme disease in 2010, following months of misdiagnosis, Mr. Roth committed himself to raising awareness about Lyme and other tick-borne diseases. Through his work with TBDA, Mr. Roth is leading efforts to advance initiatives aimed at developing a more reliable and effective diagnostic test for tick-borne diseases.
Katina I. Makris 