If you met Lara today, you would see a beautiful, bright, young attorney—a wife and mother of two. Her smile exudes her love of her family and of life itself. You would be completely unaware that the first two years after she was born created a life-changing experience for her mother, Michele.

Michele Longo O’Donnell was a registered nurse when her second daughter, Lara, was born prematurely. Ironically, her nursing specialty was pediatric intensive care, so a part of her knew that the doctors were right when they urged her to let them stop all life support. The baby was born with a lung condition that would not allow the intake of enough oxygen to meet the needs of her organs, despite that she was receiving 100 percent supplemental oxygen. During the first night she had five cardiac arrests. She was an eerie color of blue. O’Donnell knew that babies like this did not live, and if they did somehow survive, the oxygen deprivation resulted in a severely mentally retarded child. But something inside her overruled the science she had been taught.

Eventually she brought Lara home. The following two years are described in O’Donnell’s book, Of Monkeys and Dragons. Lara was transformed (healed) from severe mental retardation at the age of two. There were no doctors involved, no medicine, no therapy, no special diets. One day, this child with no motor skills, who for two years had been completely unresponsive to her environment, focused her gaze on a cracker, reached out and grasped it, put it in her mouth, and swallowed. Then she did the most amazing thing—she looked at her mother—and smiled.

What IS the principle behind this miraculous healing, and how could it be applied to all disease? This was Lara’s gift to her mother and to all of us, as O’Donnell has made it her life’s work to learn it and then to teach it. "If I believed that what I saw and learned was only for that situation, and only for my own gain, I would thank God every day, tell the story on rare occasions, and be done with it. But the path of my life has given me innumerable opportunities to apply this principle, this discovery, if you will, and each time with the same positive results."

By the time Lara started school, O’Donnell had completely lost faith in traditional medicine. She had a recurring dream that she was sitting behind a desk wearing a white coat, with sick people sitting across from her, and they were all getting well. A diverse set of circumstances soon led to the opening of her Holistic Health Care Clinic in San Antonio. That was in 1976, and it is thriving still today.

People with all sorts of debilitating, often fatal, diseases come away from the clinic completely healed. O’Donnell, on the clinic’s philosophy: "The law of physics tells us that we cannot put something into a space already filled. Jesus said we cannot put new wine in old wineskins. At the clinic we have used this understanding to successfully heal for 37 years now. For instance, we cannot put nutrients into cells already full of toxic wastes. First we must remove the garbage—the toxins, then we can fill the cells with the good that they need in order to thrive. So also, we cannot put a new thought into a mind already full of whatever it is clinging to."

In the early years of the clinic, the majority of O’Donnell’s personal struggle was to try to unknow so much of what she had learned while in medicine. "I had to learn NOT to trust in my years of experience to help me with my patients. I had to learn NOT to trust in my education, and NOT to trust in the myriad of negative things that are wrong or can go wrong in any given case. Unchallenged, disease was a formidable foe. But I learned that the disease itself was not what was to be challenged, but the fear of it, the expectation of it, the education of it. In short, our very thought process needed to be detoxified."

 

Michele O’Donnell’s ‘Living Beyond Disease’ Southeast Regional Retreat will be held in Brandon on April 5, 6, & 7. Reservations at Wings Bookstore, St. Petersburg, 727-522-6657, WingsBookstore.com. Co-sponsored by Wings Bookstore at First Unity and Unity of Brandon.

Besides Of Monkeys and Dragons, her other books are The God that We’ve Created: The Basic Cause for All Disease; When the Wolf is at the Door; and Only Receive. Listen to her syndicated radio program "Living Beyond Disease" on WHNZ-1250 AM every Sunday at 9 a.m. See ad page 11.