BY NAAILAH AULADIN
If you’ve been reading my articles or spoken to me in the past, you’ll agre I am utterly and completely in love with the peninsula. I’ve been here for over five months now and I am still deepening my love for everything Baja has to offer.
Except! …
Well, except I have been experiencing some of the worst seasonal allergy symptoms for the last two months, and that, I am not fond of.
My symptoms vary and depend on the type of allergy. When it comes to seasonal allergies, I tend to experience itchy eyes accompanied by the puffy, red, sore and broken skin around my eyelids. It’s pretty miserable, I’ll admit.
Using a holistic approach and incorporating everything I have learned over the years, I have successfully been rewiring my sensitivity level to most of my allergies as this article will detail. Dealing with the air quality and the resilient desert pollens here have been my toughest battle to recalibrate my allergic reactions. It’s a battle I feel I am winning against each day, at a slow yet steady rate.
My history with allergies could earn its own book rights. I grew up on the island of Mauritius in the middle of the Indian Ocean, and part of my childhood memories are my inner struggles, trying to convince my body that everything around me was not trying to kill me.
As a child, I was allergic to everything. I would react to seafood, shellfish, mold, pets, peanuts, pollen, dust and many more. My dear mother was and continues to be, the overprotective type. I have vivid memories of her dragging me from one doctor to the next, one modality to the next, trying desperately to cure me of what appeared to be a defective immune system.
Growing up, I was often sick and my parents’ genuine desire and worry for my well-being exposed me unintentionally to both antibiotic abuse and limited exposure to the germs which have their own side effects.
As a 5-year-old, I quickly noticed a direct correlation between my complaining about my allergies and the sudden halt of something I enjoyed. I remember being banned from enjoying my mom’s legendary Mauritian-style crab soup after I complained about rashes on my legs or that I could no longer play outside because it led to white rashes from the sun. New allergies kept surfacing all the time and with that new rules to follow. Suddenly, having the allergies was irritating me more than its symptoms.
I write this article decades later, after managing to successfully calibrate my body to be more harmonious with my environment and food.
Or so I thought.
The little brat in me had such a desire to live and be free of boundaries that I quickly stopped reporting all my symptoms to my parents. With absolutely no logical understanding of what I was doing, I exposed myself to a method referred to as immunotherapy. It’s an approach where one gradually exposes the body to an increasing amount of the allergen, aiming to induce tolerance over time. As an adult, I understand the dangers and risks I was exposing myself to without any medical or adult supervision for that matter. I do owe my survival in that sense to my overprotective parents. They were both obsessed with keeping my immediate environment free from allergens and provided me access to the right tools and medication when I was on my own.
Somehow the duality of me defying them behind their back and them over-protecting me as much as they could created the right alignments for me to restructure my immune system to be less triggered and reactive.
When I moved to Ontario Canada in my late teens, I remember experiencing seasonal allergies every year. The stubborn little girl in me eventually accepted that every year, for a number of weeks, scattered throughout spring and the end of summer, I may have to rely on some over-the-counter prescription antihistamines. Not too bad given the many battles I won over the years.
In 2009 I decided to test a theory. What if I reverse-engineered the success of my previous allergy wins? How can I expose myself slowly to the pollens that bring me so much misery and inoculate myself? Local, raw multiflower honey was the obvious solution to me. My desire for a positive result from this experiment was excessively optimistic. I was trying for a baby and if this experiment worked, that would mean the possibility of a pregnancy without allergy pills.
For a full year before I got pregnant, I would ritualistically eat at least a spoonful of raw local multiflower honey daily. I continued during my pregnancy in 2010 and delivered my daughter at the peak of the treacherous ragweed season without the need for any allergy pills during my pregnancy and after her birth.
I believe, like everything else, many factors contributed to the success of my experiment. How can I recreate this success here?
Being in Baja and experiencing one of my worst cases of seasonal allergies, I had to muster a lot of humility and realize that patience was key to its success. In the past, I lived a nomadic life. Each new place brought new pollens and new environmental challenges. I have generally been able to overcome them within weeks. Not my first rodeo after all.
Baja presented a tougher challenge. After two months of working simultaneously on mindset, preventative care, over-the-counter drugs, raw honey from the area, biofeedback and countless other modalities I feel the progress, slowly maybe, but progress still. My love and desire to live in this region have provided me with more than enough fuel to deal with the symptoms while I calibrate to my new environment. To share how you have dealt with the allergies from this region or comment on this article, message me on Instagram @naailahauladin or on Facebook: Naailah Auladin
