29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change your Life

by Cami Walker

Download PDF

Return to Master Table of Contents

Cami Walker. 29 Gifts: How a Month of Giving Can Change your Life. Philadelphia, PA: Perseus Books Group 2009. 226 pp.  $19.95

Cami Walker developed severe Multiple Sclerosis one month after her marriage. Over a period of two years she suffered weakness, incoordination and visual problems that limited her abilities to continue her writing career. She also suffered from severe pains. Numbers of consultations with neurologists and emergency room doctors led to her taking many drugs, including pain killers and sleeping pills. She was becoming seriously depressed, having difficulty sleeping, and suffering panic attacks about becoming totally incapacitated. Her husband was exhausted from caring for her on top of working to support the couple.

Walker was lucky to have a neighbor, Mbali, a medicine woman of South African origins. Mbali gave her a self-healing prescription: Give away 29 gifts in 29 days.  

Healing doesn’t happen in a vacuum, Cami, but through our interactions with other people. By giving, you are focusing on what you have to offer others, inviting more abundance into your life. Giving of any kind is taking a positive action that begins the process of change. It will shift your energy for life.

In addition to giving the gifts, you’re supposed to keep a journal for those 29 days. If you skip a day for some reason… it’s best to start over, to release the energy that is building and allow it to begin building again. (p. xxvi.)

It’s a good idea to keep a journal to record the experience and to be mindful of both the journal and the gifts so that they can do their work of transforming you. She mentioned, too, that starting each day with a short meditation and an affirmation can help.

The gifts can be anything from space change to a kind word or thought. Along with giving them, the prescription involves thinking of things to be grateful for each day and reflecting on the tradition of giving in your family.

“Gratitude keeps your heart open. When you give with an open heart, you receive the profound gift of humanity”, Mbali explains. (p. 14-15)

While it seemed strange at first, this proved to be transformative for Cami.

After less than a week of giving, despite my early skepticism, there’s no denying that something intangible has relaxed inside me. Last time I spoke with Mbali I tried to explain this to her, but she already understood. “It’s weird. It’s like I’m being supported everywhere I look,” I told her, “And the more I give little things, the easier it’s become for me to accept assistance and love from others. Instead of being tied up in knots all the time.” Mbali had seen this effect many times and wasn’t surprised. (p. 29)

Walker also did a lot of other work on herself. For example:

I awoke at 3 a.m. from a peaceful sleep, sat straight up and yelled out loud: “The symptoms are the cure!”

This woke up Mark, and I began an elaborate, frenzied explanation of this message and vision from my dream.

“Think about how the MS disease process works,” I rambled to him. “My immune cells attack my nerve cells, which exposes the nerve. Immediately my body begins to try and repair the damage by forming scar tissue and growing new neural paths to restore the functions associated with that specific area of the nerve. What if the symptoms are actually coming from this healing process – from my nervous system trying to repair itself?” He stopped me after a couple of minutes and told me I should get out of bed and write what I was telling him. I wondered at the time if this might be a ploy to get me out of the room so he could go back to sleep, but I’m so grateful he told me to record my dream because I often refer back to what I wrote that night.

I spent the rest of the wee hours of that morning alternating between meditating, writing in my journal, and going in and out of a “lucid dream” state – this happens when your body is asleep but you’re conscious of the dream and you can manipulate it. During the journaling, I drew a bunch of diagrams of what I saw as my “disease process.” While I was in the meditative state, I felt that I was watching what was going on in my body on a cellular level. It was as if I was looking at diagrams in a medical textbook. I could see the instant one cell would light up and attack the other. Every time I saw this happen, I would talk to the cells and tell them to stop. Over and over I would watch this process begin and then reverse, knowing that if I could see it, I could change the picture. There wasn’t anything frightening about it to me. I felt oddly detached, watching my cells in action.

At the time, my main symptoms were memory problems, blurred vision in my right eye, back pain, and numbness in my hands and “my claw” – which happened when a spasm would leave my fingers curled up.

At some point during my meditation, I fell asleep. When I awoke fully in the morning, I had feeling back in two fingers on my right hand and the vision in my right eye was clear again. A message seemed to resonate in the room around me, telling me over and over: “Feel and experience every symptom. The symptoms are part of the healing process." (p. 40-41)

This book will be an inspiration to anyone suffering with a chronic disease, depression, or with self-doubts and self-criticisms. It is an easy and enjoyable read, while offering many gems of wonderfully wise advice and experience.

By day 27, I am astounded by the magical and miraculous shifts in my life:
· I am feeling happier, healthier, and more in awe with life.
· I find myself smiling and laughing more and more every day.
· My body is stronger and I am recovering from the MS flare that has plagued me for months - I was even able to stop walking with my   cane by the end of week two.
· My business has exploded with new opportunities.
· I have started reconnecting with my amazing community of friends and family, people I had been pushing away out of fear since my MS diagnosis.
· I am beginning to form a community of new friends and clients in Los Angeles after feeling isolated here in my new home for several months.
· I am experiencing deeper intimacy in my relationship with my husband.
And this is only the beginning. (p. 167)

Read more about ways in which Walker developed her self-healing in this great book and at the www.29Gifts.org website.

Review by Daniel Benor, MD
Editor-in-Chief, IJHC

Return to Master Table of Contents