My client’s son was diagnosed with PANDAS at a young age and has had chronic illness and learning difficulties. Why doesn’t his mind work well?

This is a karmic difficulty. It is the carryover of circumstances in other lifetimes where he has had chronic illness that resulted in neurological impairment and that is being recapitulated in the current life because those lifetimes have been reawakened through inner ruminations and fear because of experiencing the shock of having to deal with microbial pathogens yet again in the current life. This is a karmic setup to revisit old traumas and have them repeated and perhaps even intensified in their adverse effects. The intention of karma is to provide an opportunity for healing and a resolution but will not always lead to success and may end up worsening things. In this boy’s case, he has come out ahead in the sense he is able to survive these chronic illnesses whereas in other lifetimes there were fatal outcomes from infectious illness. So things are improving even though his life has been quite challenging and indeed a burden to all of the family members, each in their own way. This too is part of the karmic agenda to allow them to reckon with their past exposure and witnessing of these difficulties and the roles they played in their own wounding in being a part of tragedy. So they are having an opportunity for healing here as well and this will ultimately be a very positive undertaking because there will be enough healing from the divine to solve the dilemma for all in the family with respect to karmic obligations. As you know, the symptoms are often the last thing to leave, so there may be some struggles for quite a long time—for many, many years in fact. This will all depend on how things go, to what extent the Law of Karma can be satisfied, and have divine grace substitute for some of the personal rebalancing otherwise required that may involve suffering and to what extent this must be endured for a time yet. There are many variables at stake and part of the difficulty as well will flow from how each individual reacts to the healing outreach with respect to allowing it to do its work or resisting it through having triggered many negative inner beliefs that will get in the way—denial of the self, denial of the divine either through disbelief, lack of confidence, or a fatalistic perspective that one is powerless, for example. All of these are weaknesses that will delay and confound the healing outreach until enough is done to peel back the constraints themselves. The important thing here is that the healing outreach has been launched and will make all the difference in the long term. That is a true blessing and will enable the family to move on in future lifetimes without these same burdens coming back around again. That itself is a major, major achievement even if there are many years of struggle still remaining while the healing proceeds. Time will tell what the pacing turns out to be. We do not like to overpromise such things because this can undermine faith if we err on the side of optimism and the clients become disenchanted because they feel it is a false promise and, therefore, they may have been misguided or misled when such is not the case, it is only that with so many uncertainties the precise timeline can never be predicted with great accuracy, but we do see good things happening.