How Acceptance Led to My Healing Breakthrough From CFS
This is exactly my second post, and I’m thrilled to launch this blog and my website. They’ve been 15 years in the making, although I like to think that everything we’ve experienced leads to this moment of now.
In 2005, I lived what my father called a charmed life. I was doing work I loved as a broadcast journalist. I was in a happy relationship and was surrounded by family. But at 35, everything was about to change.
On a trip abroad, I experienced a shock trauma that left me so sick, I became disabled. This began an exasperating morass that would swallow up much of my thirties and forties.
I went to the best doctors in western and eastern medicine. They ran a dizzying array of tests and came up with a dizzying array of concerns. They usually pointed to high levels of Epstein-Barr and other viruses. A naturopath said my adrenal glands were shot. A specialist said my mitochondria wasn’t working. They all agreed on Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, a name that belies the exhaustion, body pain, headaches, brain fog, digestive issues, insomnia and anxiety that racked my life for 13 years.
During this time, I suffered the stress of losing my career, income and house, my sense of identity and ability to move freely in the world. In these tenuous years, I lost four close family members and the stable family structure I knew. My fiance left, too.
In the impossibility of it all, I finally stopped grasping for my old life, a miracle cure and even my future dreams. It’s not that I lost hope completely. I did simple things that brought relief: meditation, yoga, watching leaves change color, reading poems that pointed to the nature of reality beyond our passing fancies. The spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle became my soundtrack, along with the birds.
Little did I know, this undoing was the best thing for myself and my health. I had no ulterior motive but to survive. That state of surrender brought something more meaningful than a cure: inner peace. It also opened me to unseen wisdom and answers I’d been seeking. Such serendipity!
I began to experience the relief of non-resistance. We may not like or even agree with the world, but we accept what comes Because it’s here. And it causes more pain when we fight.
After a year of this unraveling, I still felt like I had an endless flu. But I didn’t create extra emotional suffering with my thoughts. This state of mind set me up for a lightbulb moment.
A woman from an on-line writing class told me about her complete recovery from CFS. She explained the groundbreaking work of Dr. John Sarno, who discovered that the brain protects us from feeling deep-seated emotions by creating physical symptoms. Since the brain generates all pain anyway, it’s not a far stretch.
She helped me see that my exhaustion began and continued through a harrowing time in my life. Despite therapy, I’d never processed my unconscious feelings, so they manifested physically. In that 3-hour conversation, I had a startling realization: “I am not sick!” I actually went from being mostly homebound that winter to running around the block. Multiple times!
Dr Sarno’s work isn’t voodoo. It’s based on science and his experience with thousands of patients. My brain had learned fatigue and pain as coping mechanisms. It got stuck. Each time a person in a white coat gave me an unsolvable diagnosis, it closed my world of possibly a little more. They kept pointing to physical causes for my physical symptoms, which kept me distracted from feeling my emotions.
Dr. Sarno’s work offered a new possibility: My brain is neuroplastic and changes based on my thoughts, feelings and experiences. Once I got this on a cellular level, my nervous system gave a gigantic sigh and began restoring itself. I spent the next year learning to feel my emotions and retrain my brain for a state of wellbeing.
What might you pursue simply for enjoyment? How would you spend your days if you weren’t worried about your health? What stressful idea can you surrender?