(Re)introduction: Hi, I'm Laure. What Is Autoimmune Theory and Practice?
Healing is possible.
The conditions of late industrial civilization are inflammatory. The air, the food systems, the pace, the isolation, the grief that has nowhere to land. These are metabolic events. Our bodies conform to the terrain, and autoimmune results. And, healing is possible. Cultural healing, ancestral healing, ecological healing. “To heal” means “to make whole”, to restore to wholeness, to remember the ecology of being in the world.
The very idea of autoimmunity is predicated on fragmentation and separateness. I use the word autoimmune in order to change what it can mean. I am a patient researcher. I research from inside the autoimmune way of being and I make the thinking visible. For the last six months I have been rebuilding a platform to think in public. The platform is hosted on substack (for now), and its domain is autoimmunetheory.com. You are reading it right now.
My thinking draws on the practical knowledge that comes from decades of reading my own blood against geographic and seasonal movement. I produce essays, a podcast, and a weekly curation of research across whatever I am doing right now. Lately, that’s Ayurveda, immunology, ecology, pharmacology, biopolitics, and cross-tradition medical knowledge.
My body is prone to bleeding. The condition is manageable and incurable. I have lived with a diagnosis for over twenty-five years, over 80% of my entire life. Its name is immune thrombocytopenia, and all the cures in the allopathic arsenal were thrown at me over decades to manage it. Over the last 6 years, I have moved away from allopathic medicine for myself, with high levels of success.
Non-resolution held over a lifetime turns out to be philosophically productive. When your body continues to flow through a state medicine can describe but can’t resolve, the question stops being “how do I get better?” and becomes “what does this experience make visible that existing paradigms miss? How do I live this way for all time?” This reframe changes everything downstream.
Here is what the last few months have looked like on the ground:
I spent January in Thailand, walking the streets of Chiang Mai for delicious autoimmune-safe food, getting tutored in qigong for self-healing with the masterful Julie Liu. Then, February through April I was in Kerala, South India. I go to India for my own spiritual practice as well as field work for the Académie Québécoise d’Ayurvéda, where I have served as adjunct director since last summer.
The AQA trains Ayurvedic practitioners in Québec. I develop curriculum, research traditional source material, communicate with students, maintain infrastructure, and coordinate with our small teaching team. This winter’s work included restructuring the Ayurvedica Marma Therapy course, building course materials from classical texts, and sitting with a monastic sanskrit tutor who told me to focus on my therapeutic practice and making money before I devote too much time to the language.
I just completed a six-month training in Siddha marma, capstoned with a three-week residential intensive. Siddha runs parallel to Ayurveda without being derivative of it. Marma, in this tradition, is a precise and surgical method for activating prana. Its application is short, a treatment lasts fifteen minutes. The body is a strong gold box and marma is a high-karat gold key: precise, fragile, not to be forced. Massage may prepare the ground but marma is not massage. The therapeutic art lies in reading the present moment and determining the direction of balance. My training was explicit about this: five different healers will produce five different theories from one case. The healer’s own balance is the instrument. You must know your own channels before you can read someone else’s.
In late March and early April my bleeding condition left me desperately fatigued and inflamed. The doctors at the ashram told me to go to the big hospital in Kochi. I went to Kanyakumari instead, stood at the southern tip of the subcontinent where three waters meet. Then ten days of Takradhara and Njavaratheppu, medicated buttermilk poured over the forehead, rice and milk and bala root cooked into paste and slathered across the body. Cooling and nourishing treatments for blood that has become too hot, blood that has lost its container.
This month, the first episodes of the AITP podcast go live. The first episode is a technical interview with Ayurvedic research pharmacologist Dr. P. Rammanohar, in which we discuss autoimmunity as an ecological and planetary health concern within the paradigm of Ayurveda. Coming soon, my conversation with the writer and shamanic practitioner Manda Scott about the need for active relationally with the web of life.
Isolation is a painful illusion. As the cross-pollination of disciplines in my research attests, the body is an ecology in continuous dance with the ecologies it inhabits. Holons in holarchy. The terrain you live in and the terrain you are made of are the same question asked at different scales. Autoimmunity is a navigational state, a response to conditions that precede the individual body: conditions of terrain, of transmission, of what entered and could not be digested.
Here’s what I’m doing now:
My therapeutic practice has two arms. Remote consultation for people anywhere who want to understand their condition through a framework older and more metabolically precise than the one they were given. Consultation also means somatic education, coaching in qigong, Feldenkrais-informed movement, the slow work of teaching a nervous system to orient itself again.
Hands-on bodywork happens when we are lucky enough to be in the same room. The bodywork I do now rests on three pillars, drawing from Tuina (TCM bodywork), Marma, and Craniosacral Therapy, though no single modality name holds the whole thing anymore. My map of the body is Ayurvedic primarily, with TCM and allopathic as necessary. Recent trainings have changed my method significantly.
In Ayurveda, one definition of health is swastha, “being established in the self”. But which self? Capital S, Self, is available, if we listen to what is going on below all the noise.
My obsession is life force. Qi, prana, pneuma, spirit. What moves through tissue when tissue is alive and what departs when it isn’t. What the dhatu fires metabolize and what they fail to digest. What survives industrial fractionation. What a heart that is grieving leaks into the world.
I navigate. I do this within the legal frame Québec health law requires: no diagnosis, no prescription, no treatment. The nautical-ecological register that I’ve adopted to describe my work is both philosophically precise and legally necessary. The body of the autoimmune is a ship lost at sea. I am the navigator they onboard to help them steer the craft, but they are the craft. I’m building this in the open; you can watch this form, and you can join me in shaping it.
Write to me. Here is my email: laure@mxmarin.ca
I strive for inbox zero. I hover around inbox-fourteen. I never fail to respond to email from an actual person. Come on out and say hello. I will personally respond. If needed, behind PGP keys across high security servers abroad.
