But the funny thing (not funny haha, more like funny-oh-gee-look-at-all-this-rage-inside-me-funny) is that whether it’s a good day or a bad day, it’s neither. Because inevitably, if I’m feeling good I’ll at some point in the day suddenly start to feel not good. Or if I’m feeling not good, I’ll at some point suddenly start to feel good. Except that sometimes, if I’m feeling not good, I’ll keep feeling not good all day long, and there won’t be a “suddenly” that day. Funny.

All of which is to say, I don’t remember enrolling but apparently I have signed up for a master class in impermanence. The class’s nickname being MS, of course.

So what does one do when they cannot even count on the most basic thing – their body? Forget expecting people to actually stay alive just because they’ve been alive for my entire life. I’ve lowered my expectations now. I just want to be able to rely on my body to function properly. Is that so much to ask? I mean, really? But alas, it seems my body is simply not a trustworthy pal these days. And banging my head against this wall of truth has only given me many, many headaches, and some serious bruising.

Two Choices

So I’ve finally arrived at a place of acceptance. I have accepted that for whatever reason, the lesson the universe thinks I need to learn now is about the essential unflinching can’t-pretend-it’s-otherwise nature of this reality, which is that change is indeed the only constant. And the illusion of stability is just that, an illusion. Up until this year, I’ve been able to live within that illusion and get by okay. But things have gotten heavy. And in the face of the less than pleasant fact that there is nothing I can rely on to remain stable, alive, and working properly, even myself, I am left with only two choices.

One: I can go insane. Fall down a black hole of existential despair about the nature of the universe. Or two: I can become present, now, here in this, which is the only place where life is actually taking place anyway.

So I’ve chosen the second option (though I’ve certainly had my fair share of glimmers of the first in the last several months). And I’m beginning to get it. There actually is something that we can rely on in this world, and it’s this moment. You know how I know that? Because this moment is happening, right now. So we can rely on it. Because it’s now. And now. And now. And the shit in the past and the fear of the future are all movie projections born in the land of make-believe (my mind). But now is here. And now. So I’m putting my attention on this, on cultivating my ability to be present. In this moment. Here. Now.

The best way I’ve found to do this is Michael Brown’s book The Presence Process: A Journey into Present Moment Awareness. I’ve talked about it a lot on this blog before – mostly last summer when I read it the first time. But I suppose I had to suffer a lot more before I could conjure the necessary level of commitment and will and discipline to really go through the entire 10-week program and take it seriously. If you haven’t already, please go get this book and read it and do the program and tell me what your experience is with it. It’s a game-changer, and I’m pretty sure we could all use one.

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Devon White

On Wednesday night, I had the pleasure of interviewing Devon White, hypnotist, consultant, and coach. Devon and I spoke about the emotional aspects of living with a chronic illness, and he addressed many of the issues, concerns, and questions sent in by listeners. It was a comprehensive, inspiring 2-hour call. Here’s an excerpt:

white_excerpt

As always, if you’d like to find out how to get the entire series as a digital download to listen to at your convenience, click here. To learn  more about Devon and the work he does go here.

Next week will be the last installment of the MS Voices Interview Series. We’ll be closing it out with Ashton Embry on Wednesday at 9 PM EST. See you on the call!

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Scott Johnson, President of the Myelin Repair Foundation

As many of you may already know, I had the honor of speaking with Myelin Repair Foundation President Scott Johnson yesterday. We spoke for about 45 minutes about the problems with our current drug development system and how the Myelin Repair Foundation is working to create massive systemic change to bring effective MS drugs to you much faster.

The success they’ve already had in changing an archaic and bureaucratic system is quite impressive. It was informative and inspiring to hear from Scott Johnson himself about why he started the company and what he anticipates for the future of MS treatment.

Here’s a clip from the interview. If you want to hear the entire thing, I’ll be re-broadcasting it tonight, Thursday Oct. 7th, at 9 PM EST. If you haven’t already you can sign up for the series by clicking on the “MS Voices” link in the navigation bar above and entering your name and email. It’s free! If you’ve already signed up, then you should have received an email with the details to attend the call.

johnson_excerpt

The red pillow on my carpet where it all went down.

Monday around 9:30 p.m., if you had walked into my house you would have found me sitting cross-legged on the floor, rocking back and forth, sobbing, heaving, and thrusting out deep, guttural, staccato sounds of agony.

This is not what I typically do on a Monday evening.

But something serendipitous is happening. Not fun, no not fun at all. Not even a little bit. But definitely serendipitous. I have found myself in a moment of my life where I’m faced with an extremely challenging and painful emotional situation. And (finally) the universe has simultaneously presented me with the tools to address it. In fact, not just to address it but to use it and evolve through it. (“The only way out is through.”) The tools have appeared as the work of Michael Brown and his two books The Presence Process, which I spoke of a few days ago, and Alchemy of the Heart (Amazon Affiliate link), as well as his audios from his various seminars via Live365 radio on The Presence Process station, which you can access through his website The Presence Portal.

The essence of Brown’s work is this: Every time you get upset (set up) by a situation in your life, it is simply a trigger, a reflection of unintegrated emotional charges from your childhood. Every time. Without exception.

We spend our entire lives running from our deep pain and hurt. We drink, we eat, we fuck, we pray, we do this, we do that, anything to avoid really, really feeling anything. When an upsetting situation arises in our life, we attempt to fix it by changing our physical circumstance. We switch lovers, we move to a different town, we get a different job. Or we simply believe that the situation that’s upsetting us is the fault of whomever is involved, and we ask ourselves questions like “Why does this always happen to me?” But because we’re not addressing the causal point of our experience – the emotional signature from our childhood that hasn’t been processed and integrated – we just recreate the same circumstances in a “new” place.

Being With the Emotion

So Brown advises the following I’d-rather-stick-needles-under-my-fingernails exercise instead: He says to sit down and simply “be with” the emotion without condition. Do not tell yourself the story about what’s happening and why and who’s to blame. Do not try to suppress or criticize what you are feeling. Just sit your ass down and be with it. Feel the feeling. And in doing so, just as we don’t need to tell our body how to breathe, we don’t need to tell ourselves how to integrate these emotions. By allowing ourselves to have the experience, we’re finally allowing the innate wisdom of our body to do the work. We don’t have to know how. We just need to trust and know that it will integrate. And once it does, we have cleaned up the causal point of this anger, fear, and grief. (At least one of them anyway.)

Which brings us back to my grief-stricken spasms Monday night, sitting on my living room floor. Because what happened was this: Without the story to accompany this feeling, something opened up. As I sat there emoting all over myself, I felt very surely and deeply that what I was crying about did not in fact have a damn thing to do with what I thought I was crying about. I was grieving from a place much older and more expertly hidden. And when it was done, I felt a calm take over. I didn’t feel “good”, but I did feel…at rest.

Dis-ease

But what was really interesting for me was that as I sat there, still and centered in the aftermath, I understood from a place that didn’t involve thought that what I had just released healed a part of what Multiple Sclerosis is in my body. Because I know, as surely as I’ve ever known anything, that my illness was born of that pent up dis-ease. I know that I have just begun – I mean truly begun – the gritty, dirty, ugly, uncomfortable work of becoming exquisitely healthy (and it doesn’t have anything to do with prescription medication). And what I love about this particular model is that Michael Brown is not a guru and he doesn’t claim to have the answers. He has simply communicated a path that works. But the work, and the answers, that’s all us.

When I asked Bruce Lipton how to change my beliefs, this is the answer I was looking for. It’s not as pretty and clean as I would have liked, but it’s powerful, and I know as I’ve ever known anything that I’m on my way, and MS is on it’s way…out.

And as for the extremely challenging emotional situation I’m dealing with right now, I’m going to trust in one of Brown’s favorite statements, which is that we don’t get what we want or need, but we do get what we require. We always get what we require.

Want more inspiration? Read Broke Down or go to the main page to Get Inspired.

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Photo by Jason Nicholls, Flickr

I’m part of a mother’s circle. We meet once a week and talk about our lives. This week, one woman who I’ll call Rachel broke down in tears and began explaining that she was having a particularly difficult time. She feels unappreciated and overworked at her job and guilty because it prevents her from spending time with her husband and her two young children since she commutes to the city and doesn’t get home until 8pm or later, after the kids are asleep.

The stress of her situation has been manifesting as bouts of vertigo, chronic stomach upset, insomnia, lightheadedness, anxiety, and fatigue (some of the body’s greatest hits for communicating we’re in resistance not flow, we’re going against our instincts and intuition and doing something that’s not a fit.)

“But there’s no room for me not to feel well,” she declared. “My husband’s cornered the market on that. He owns that entire territory.”

Her husband, who she’s been with for eight years, was just recently diagnosed with Lyme Disease, but he’s been suffering mysterious chronic symptoms since before they met, and they’ve spent well over $20,000 on medical bills for him.

“He’s sick all the time,” she said, “and I find myself getting angry and impatient with him and wishing there was some space in our relationship for me to not always be the strong healthy one. I feel awful about it because I know he’s really sick, he has something real that’s wrong with him, but I just wish sometimes that I could take a break. I wish I could be the one to say, ‘I’m not feeling well I need to stay home today.’ Or ‘Honey can you make dinner tonight I need to rest?’ But that’s his role.”

Disease vs. Illness

I listened to her tell her story with great interest, thinking that here was the difference between disease and illness. Disease is the set of clinical symptoms a person has. Illness, however, is the entire constellation of issues and feelings surrounding our disease. Illness is what happens when that set of symptoms belongs to a real person, who is part of a family and a workplace and a community. Doctors address disease, but rarely approach the effects of illness in our life and relationships.

So today I want to know what the biggest, most pressing issues are that come up for you in your life, in your relationships, as a result of your illness? Have they changed since you’ve received an “official” diagnosis? I want to know where the major areas of disruption and dissatisfaction are for you so that I can bring these topics and conflicts into the foreground and hopefully provide some insight as to how to resolve or at least better manage them.

Here, I’ll start. Though my health has stabilized significantly in the past two years, I’ve had my fair share of relationship issues that sprung from my illness, most of which were during my ten years of mystery sickness, before my diagnosis:

1. My best friend was convinced I just needed to drink a few beers and I’d be fine. She thought I was just being “dramatic” and maintained that position for several years.
2. My sister used to come into the city to hang out with me and I’d have to bail out at the last minute because my fatigue was so intense I couldn’t leave the apartment. In response, she would feel I was being selfish and/or I had some secret phobia that was controlling my life.
3. My ex-boyfriend used to get furious with me when I’d need to leave a party early. He had little patience for the limitations my severe diet restrictions placed on where we ate. I once missed his birthday party because I was in his bedroom sleeping all night. He only just recently confessed that he was still sorta angry about that.
4. My ex-husband, while we were dating, believed that I was depressed because I would say in the morning that I’d want to go out and then by the evening I’d say I didn’t have the energy. Years later, when we had already married and divorced and I was finally diagnosed, he apologized for that.
5. Many photographers in the NYC area would never hire me to assist them again because of how many times I canceled or left early because I was “sick” though there was no outer manifestation that they could see, like a cough or sneeze.

These are just a few of the more surface issues that came up for me in my relationships, though all of them point to deeper attitudes and beliefs about my sickness that – if I had had the awareness and communication skills I have now – I could have worked through with each person and established a much deeper rapport and a much more authentic support system.

What about you? What are the issues around your illness that most impact you and your relationships?

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Photo by artic pj, Flickr

As some of you may know, I’m on a manifesting kick. On Friday, I asked the universe for a magical weekend. I didn’t know what I meant when I asked for it, I just knew I wanted to experience something magical.

Freakin’ universe.

It hooked me up, big time, but as usual, with irony and a very dark sense of humor. I’m starting to think I need to go at this whole manifesting thing more like a lawyer – I need to get much more specific with my requests and include lots of disclaimers and addendums. Anyway, I won’t go into the details except to say that I found myself on Saturday afternoon with a freshly torn broken heart. And from this torn heart came the raw and open space I seem to be creating for myself a lot lately. It’s the space, incidentally, where magic most easily enters.

And enter it did, in multiple ways – some very fun and light and some profound. And the cool thing about being on the lookout for magic is that I begin finding it everywhere, and in the thrill of discovering it comes an immense gratitude, and the sense that me and the universe have conspired to make this magic together, as a team, all of which make me start believing that anything is possible, and suddenly I feel like I’m inside a flow, an ease, a state that is very much the opposite of dis-ease.

One of the ways magic entered this weekend was through my very magical friend Emily, who I spent the last couple days with and who shared “The Light Prayer” with me. I find this prayer to be very healing, so I’m sharing it with you.

Is anyone taking care of me?

Having a chronic illness can sometimes feel like pushing through a pool of sticky mud. Caught in the mire, it’s hard to remember and tap into that force – the something greater than ourselves that is taking care of us.

Is anyone taking care of me? Am I going to be okay? Am I okay now? These are the prevailing thoughts that take over in the times when MS is flaring. The survival questions. The primal stuff. When I’m symptomatic, I question whether there is anyone looking out for me at all, and I long intensely for the security and the bliss that comes from taking my good health for granted.

Illness is a graduate dissertation, a master class in faith. This prayer, at least for me, reminds me of my faith when I’m challenged by MS or by a broken heart, and moves me from feeling sorry for myself to feeling deeply and fundamentally safe, and well. I hope it does this for you too.

The Light Prayer

Light before me,

Light behind me,

Light at my left,

Light at my right,

Light above me,

Light beneath me,

Light unto me,

Light in the eyes of those who see me,

Light in the ears of those who listen to me,

Light in the hearts of those who think of me,

Light in the hearts of those who speak of me,

Light restore me to health,

Light be always in my heart,

Light be within me,

Light establish me forever,

Light be around me and preserve me,

Light be before me and lead me,

Light be within me and give me life,

Light be near me and rule me,

Light be beneath me and fortify me,

I love the Light in those whom I may have offended,

Knowingly or unknowingly,

May the light be with them,

So be it,

So it is,

It is done.

Want more inspiration? Read The Healing Strategy Your Doctor Never Told You About or go to the main page to Get Inspired.

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Photo by denmo3000, Flickr

I don’t receive emails from my ex-husband anymore. Not because he doesn’t send them, but because I’ve set up a filter so they go directly to SPAM. My SPAM folder has much more tolerance for toxicity than I do.

But there are loopholes, like this past weekend when an email from my ex got through because he sent it through YouTube, with a link to a video called “Planning for a Life With MS” by the National MS Society. This is what he wrote:

“This is very valuable for anyone with MS, but far more for you who’s not known for planning-anticipating, and logic. I’m very concerned about that part of you.”

I love that he sent this to me. I read it and laughed out loud and thought to myself: “Thank you for my next blog post.”

My ex-husband is a masterful hypnotist (I’ll explain this in a minute) and he’s using a very powerful communication tool here, called a presupposition. The presupposition in his statement is that what I need to “plan for” and “anticipate” is my inevitable disability. He’s “very concerned” because clearly there is something coming in my future that we should both be very concerned about.

The reason presuppositions are so powerful is that they are not directly stated. He didn’t say “There is a possibility that you could be disabled in the future, so maybe you should plan for that.” Instead he assumed it into his statement as fact, as the incontrovertible reality, which then gets communicated as fact to the person being spoken to. Most people don’t even notice it, so it goes right in without question.

Unless of course the person being communicated to (me, in this case) is aware of how language is used to build reality. As soon as I read his email, I noticed the presupposition and immediately deleted it so that I would not accept his message that disability was my inevitable future. And I want to make sure you know how to do this to, because everyone has someone like my ex-husband in their life, telling them how things are.

Everyone is surrounded by hypnotists. Unfortunately many of the messages and suggestions that people deliver – often unintentionally – are negative. As someone with an illness who wants to heal, it is essential that you learn to attune yourself to and recognize these subtle suggestions so that you only allow positive, healing messages to impact you.

What is conversation hypnosis?

When most people hear the word “hypnosis” they think of a man swinging a pendulum in front of their face or some poor guy on a stage quacking like a duck after he’s been “put under.” These are the sensationalized versions of hypnosis we’ve seen in movies and television. But the truth is, hypnosis happens every day, in regular conversations you have with your friends, your family, your co-workers, your doctors.

Hypnosis is a way of using words that is clear and precise so that, if someone chooses, they can easily take instruction. So, hypnosis is really just a way of being intentional and precise with the way you use language.

Words direct your awareness. That’s just a fact. Before I wrote the word rutebega you probably weren’t thinking about rutebegas. And yet now you are, because I used a word to direct your attention. Whenever we speak or hear words, they always direct attention – whether we mean for that to happen or not.

Since everybody speaks, everybody is always directing your attention. They are using word magic to get you to think or feel one way or another. Most people are absolutely not clear and precise with how they are using their words. However, we could call what they are doing conversational hypnosis.

For example, let’s say you’re at work and you see your friend Sue over by the water cooler. You ask her how she is and she says, “Well I have this horrible headache! My forehead and my temples are just throbbing so intensely and it won’t let up for a second. You know what I mean?”

You may think you’re just engaged in a moment of small talk with your friend, but in order for you to make sense of what Sue is saying to you, you need to feel the feeling of your forehead and your temples throbbing intensely. The leading question that she ends with: “You know what I mean?” forces you, if you hadn’t already, to consider what she means, and to do that, you must feel the sensation in your body. Sue, in a simple casual conversation, has led you to feel your head throbbing, at least for a moment. That’s conversational hypnosis.

I just want you to be realistic

Conversational hypnosis is most effective when the person doing the suggesting is someone you are in rapport with. In other words, you trust them, you like them, or they hold some position of authority in your life. This means that the people closest to you are likely to be the most effective in their suggestions. So if your husband or wife or mother or sister or best friend, for example, does not truly believe you can get well, they’ll probably reveal that in casual conversation with you, and if you’re not aware of how hypnosis works, their messages will go right in and undermine your effort to get well.

Here’s one of my favorites:

“I just want you to be realistic.”

This person, let’s say it’s your sister, is not directly telling you that she doesn’t believe you can get well. Instead, she’s presupposing (presuming, taking for granted in advance), as my ex-husband did, that you getting well is not realistic, and simply telling you to “be realistic.” The message she’s communicating, then, is that she doesn’t believe you can heal.

Now, if you’re aware of the power of conversational hypnosis, you will hear her say that and immediately notice the belief she’s communicating and reframe it for yourself. In this case, you can remind yourself that her definition of “realistic” is likely based on the Western Medicine paradigm of what is and is not possible with a chronic illness like MS. So when she uses the word “realistic” she’s only accessing a slim percentage of the possibilities that exist in the world.

What are the messages your loved ones (or not so loved ones) are communicating to you about your illness? What are the messages being communicated to you by the MS community? Notice the presuppositions. Delete or reframe the ones that don’t serve you in getting well.

Ahhh….feels good.

Want more inspiration? Read The Only Way Out is Through or go to the main page to Get Inspired.

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Photo by Sankax, Flickr

The Dream

I just moved to a new rental on Friday. An adorable little house I’d been dreaming of every day for weeks. In my mind I knew what it looked like, what it felt like, the way the light would stream in, the kind of windows and floors it would have, where in town it would be located and on what kind of street, how much it would cost. I knew it would be an extremely rare find – one might even say my criteria was unreasonable given the reality of this town’s rental market – but I thought if I just imagine it hard enough, it would appear.

And appear it did, one unsuspecting moment on Craigslist. And it was exactly what I wanted. It was perfect.

So I moved in Friday, to this charming little carriage house with cathedral wood ceilings and exposed wood beams and wideboard honey-colored wood floors and tons of windows, set on a residential street in the perfect neighborhood, on a gorgeous property of sprawling gardens. Everything I wanted, and in my price range!

Am I a Master Manifester or what? “I mean really!” I thought as I giddily carried my bags from the moving truck into the house. “Who is as powerful as I am, dreaming up their perfect place and watching it appear like magic?” Me and the universe, we’re tight. Ask and I shall receive. That’s right.

Except I didn’t ask to receive the spiders.

The Spiders

Yes, my magically manifested dream house is freakin’ full of spiders. Everywhere I look, spiders. Different sizes, different personalities. Corners, floorboards, and the bold who dare saunter unafraid into the middle of a barren floor, as if to say, “What you lookin’ at? You got a problem?”

Oh yes, yes I do, I have a very big problem. Because you see, I am bugphobic, and particularly opposed to spiders. Morally and politically opposed. There is something deep inside me that stirs with repugnance and fear at the sight of one of these eight-legged hellions walking awkwardly with their thinner-than-a-pin legs that bend in a way that shouldn’t be legal and their ugly, dense little circle bodies, or worse, the way they sit there in their webs, strung from ceilings or in corners, waiting around like the creepy little killers they are.

The Knot

This is my third night here, and for three nights and three days, I have been walking around with this knot in my chest, jumping every time I think I feel something crawling on me or moving in the periphery. I know what you’re thinking. That’s no way to live, right? Exactly! So this morning I woke up determined to take a full breath and relax into this beautiful space I had dreamed into existence, spiders be damned. And I did! … For a good fifteen minutes after waking.

But then, I was buttering a piece of gluten-free toast for my daughter and a HUGE spider appears as if from nowhere and just trots across the counter, the clean, sanitary kitchen counter, heading right toward the toast, veering left just before he arrives at the plate and continuing on to the edge of the counter and underneath, where he disappears as quickly as he appeared. I mean really! What is that? Could you live like that? Because I can’t live like that.

The Teachers

And it was in that moment – that instant of absolute incredulous disgust, that I got that these damned spiders MUST be my teachers, because the experience I was having was too intense to be irrelevant. Don’t get me wrong – this is not some la di da corny happy ending where me and the spiders live happily ever after in harmony. I’m still considering moving out, and I’ll probably sleep with one eye open tonight.

But here’s the thing – I’ve built my entire life around one singular purpose – being at my best no matter what is happening and helping others to do the same. No matter what. No matter what the symptoms. No matter how many spiders. Despite the anxiety. Despite the fear. In fact, FUCK the fear. How am I when there is NO fear? That’s the state I’ve dedicated my life to cultivating, and the one fundamental aspect of the work I do with my clients.

The Conclusion

So here I am thinking I have manifested a cute little house, my own little slice of heaven, but maybe what I’ve manifested is what I really needed – which just happens to be more akin to hell, but another opportunity to free myself of fear, to explore yet another place where I have been limited in my ability to be okay, centered, and at my best, and to go deeper and learn how to hold this state even amidst the spiders, those hideous octamonsters hanging from the ceilings and creeping out, three and four legs at a time, from the floors.

Maybe the spiders are my teachers, like MS is my teacher, like your illness is your teacher. And it’s scary, and it’s awful, and there’s a knot in our chest, and we need to really make a major effort to take a full, diaphragmatic breath, drop our shoulders, soften our eyes and decide to be okay. And maybe it would just be a hell of a lot easier and more comfortable and more convenient to just be in a house without spiders, but I have found myself here, and so the question becomes, am I going to be a victim, or am I going to take control?

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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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Dr. Mark Hyman

Dr. Mark Hyman is my kinda guy. I love that he’s willing to stand outside the paradigm of Western Medicine and say “Hey, here’s another way, and it’s a way that’s working.”

He recently published a post on his blog UltraWellness about why the current thinking on autism is wrong. He says:

“The real reason we are seeing increasing rates of autism is simply this: Autism is a systemic body disorder that affects the brain. A toxic environment triggers certain genes in people susceptible to this condition. And research supports this position.”

Does that resonate with you? It should, because Dr. Hyman’s philosophy and approach can be applied to almost any illness, and specifically to MS, which has been associated with toxic overload in the system.

“Autism is just a label. Like every condition or illness, the key is to dig into the layers and peel the onion to discover what is really happening. It is not usually one thing but a collection of insults, toxins and deficiencies piled on susceptible genetics that leads to the biochemical train wrecks we see in these children,” says Dr. Hyman.

Autism, MS. I can switch the words but the thought remains intact.

Dr. Hyman then goes on to talk about a specific case of a boy named Sam, and this is the part I really want you to check out, because so many of the deficiencies that Sam presents with are standard fare for those with MS. I love that Dr. Hyman goes step by step and discusses each deficiency and how he solved it. In fact, his detailed strategy to get Sam back to health can and should serve as a guide for you too.

And just in case you choose not to read the article (blasphemy!), I’ll give you the Cliff’s Notes: The three major keys to restoring health for anyone are:

1. Cool inflammation

2. Replace missing nutrients

3. Detoxify and reduce oxidative stress

Dr. Hyman’s post is not just useful for it’s content, but for sharing the structure of how functional medicine works. His is not a paradigm of “find a symptom, give it a drug to suppress it.” This is the true art of medicine – creating the environment in the body to allow for our own innate healing to take place.

Click here to read the full article. What do you think? Post your comments on it here.

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