Photo by Polina Sergeeva, Flickr

The phrase “keep fighting” gets bandied about the MS community quite frequently. Fight the MS monster, fight your disease, don’t give up the fight.

I understand how this can be empowering for some people, a cheerleading phrase of encouragement to keep on keepin’ on. However…

You and your illness are not separate. Multiple Sclerosis is not your enemy. It is not a foreign invader, it’s a condition of dis-ease in your body. If you relate to MS as your adversary, then you are creating a context in which the thing to do is to then attack yourself. But attacking yourself won’t help you heal. In fact, attacking yourself is what you are already doing – it’s the mechanism that is MS – the immune system waging war on itself. So it stands to reason, then, that you cannot heal your body from attacking itself by attacking yourself. Right?

Nobody yet knows what triggers the immune system to turn on itself as fiercely as it does in someone with MS. But I’ve always found the body to be comically literal. If you spend a good portion of your life telling yourself what a piece of shit you are in myriad ways, your body will listen. How it manifests from person to person may vary, but your body will get the message – it will bend itself to the reality you create in the system of you. If that reality is “ME is bad, attack me” then you are giving your body the literal command to attack itself.

Does this sound crazy to you? I am sure it does, if you believe in the Newtonian-influenced paradigm of Western medicine in which the mechanical body has nothing to do with the mind. But from a quantum perspective (which is currently shaking up science as we know it), our thoughts create our reality. There is no body and mind duality. There is only a bodymind.

Why me?

Once the initial shock of my MS diagnosis wore off, I began to consider the years leading up to it. I kind of wondered “why me”, but not really. I knew why me. I had been wading around in a pool of self-loathing for as long as I can remember. If I hadn’t been so terrified in those early days of my diagnosis, I probably would have marveled at the simple and poignant literalness of the illness I had manifested. I certainly marvel at it now. I mean really, it’s funny! My body has quite the sense of humor, if you like dark comedy, that is.

Surrender

I think it was Einstein or some other smart dude who said you can’t solve a problem from the same state in which it was created. So what can we do instead of “fight” MS? Some people may think I’m nitpicking, that the word “fight” is irrelevant. But language frames our experience and directs and creates our reality. So if what we want is to heal and be healthy, the language we use about our illness with others and with ourselves matters.

So instead of fighting MS, maybe we can surrender to it. And by surrender, I don’t mean give up. I mean feel into what it means. What is the message your body is sending you? What is this illness meant to show you? Don’t fight, flow.

Accept.

From a state of acceptance for what is, we free ourselves from the tension and anxiety held in place by the state of battle. Now that I’ve introduced the concept of the Default, I should mention here that acceptance for what is in any given moment is a great way access your Default. Resisting what is will make it impossible, because that resistance will manifest as tension in your muscles that will keep you from being able to relax into the state of you when you just are…the way you were born to be…satisfied, effective, radiantly healthy.

If we accept where we are, we can begin to then find out what it means to move into a state of health. Instead of trying to defend ourselves from the MS enemy, let’s find out what we need to do for our bodies and our lifestyle and our spirit so that we can be in such a way that MS isn’t.

Want more inspiration? Read The Light Prayer or go to the main page to Get Inspired.

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This is the Default symbol

Remember the Chair of Despair I spoke about the other day? For most people, it’s crazy to suggest that how you organize your body shapes your perception of the world. Most people think just the opposite. For example, if it’s nice outside and the sun is shining, I’ll be in a good mood. Rather than, if I organize myself from a position of confidence and possibility, the world will seem great no matter what’s going on, be it sunshine or rain.

If the structure of your body shapes your perception, then an ill-formed structure, like the way someone must sit in the Chair of Despair, leads to an ill-formed perception, which leads to illness. On the other hand, someone who is organized in a well-formed way will have well-formed perceptions, leading to wellness.

So what does it mean to be organized in a well-formed way? This is your Default state – the specific position from which you operate most exquisitely. Your Default, as in, these were the Default settings when you arrived on the planet. When you are operating from this position it is as though anything is possible and you’re ready to make it happen.

I’m going to leave you with one savory thought and this thought is based on evidence I have seen countless times. When you are in the position of you at your absolute best, illness isn’t.

So what is the structure of your body when you’re at your best? When you think back to the best moments of your life, what do you notice was true of you?

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The Chair of Despair

You see the chair in this picture? That’s the Chair of Despair. It was dubbed such by my friend Kiela, the owner of this aesthetically pleasing but unfortunate piece of furniture.

At first it was just a chair like any other, and hadn’t yet earned its esteemed title. But then Kiela began to notice that whenever she would sit in this chair long enough, everything would begin to feel less okay, and she would find herself thinking negative, limiting thoughts. Then she noticed that when she and her partner Tara would have conversations about their relationship, if Tara was sitting in the Chair of Despair inevitably the conversation would not go as well as if she were seated anywhere else in the room.

During one particular conversation, when things started to take a turn for the worse, she looked at Tara sitting there in the Chair of Despair and noticed that she was curled up in the fetal position, her knees pulled in toward her chest, her shoulders hunched over. You see, the thing about this chair is that it’s shaped in such a way that it’s not really possible for a person to comfortably sit up straight. So inevitably, those who sit in it quickly find themselves in an extreme slouch. And from the position of a slouch, the world seems different, because the way you hold your body effects what you think, feel, believe.

Structure not content

In the last installment of the Changing Your Beliefs series, Caught in a Bad Romance, we talked about how to revise a belief using content – stating the belief you want and then going about creating and gathering the evidence to prove the truth of the new belief for yourself. In this last installment of the series, we’ll focus on changing your beliefs using structure, not content.

Your neurosomatic position

The way you experience the world, and literally the way you can experience the world, is a function of the neurosomatic position you hold. What do I mean by this? Well let’s look at the word neurosomatic.

Neuro = the nervous system, through which information streams in from the external world, goes to the brain, is processed, and then sent back out to direct the muscles.

Somatic = the structure of your body – the way you hold yourself. For example, the tilt of your pelvis, the tonus of your lower back muscles.

The Default

Unless you’re a brain in a jar, neurosomatics effect you. You have a body and the way you organize your muscles and where your patterns of tension and relaxation are form the structure of how you experience the world. Which brings me to the point of this post – everyone has a baseline neurosomatic way of being – a perfect position that, when you’re in it, allows you to experience the world in the most effective and satisfying way possible. It is the optimized version of you that leads to radiant health and deep satisfaction.

This position is called your Default. It’s the way you are when you’ve let go of everything and you just are…the way you were born to be. Unfortunately, this baseline way of being is interrupted by the little and big traumas that all of us experience beginning as early as the womb. But when you’re able to tap back into that original perfection, that default way of being, you’re operating from a place where trauma is not.

In a way, rather than learning how to access it, we could say that you’re unlearning the things that inhibit it.

When I’m sitting in the fetal position in the Chair of Despair, my experience of the world will be vastly different than when I am standing with good posture. Different neurosomatics yield different results. Different neurosomatics yield different beliefs! If you want to change your beliefs, change your neurosomatic position.

Accessing your Default state is usually done with an experienced facilitator who can guide you into the state and teach you how to access it for yourself. This is one of the fundamental aspects of the work I do with my clients. There are also other ways to experience it and I’ll be expanding upon this in future posts.

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