The secret ones

Tags

belly-dancer, betrayal, chronic insecurity, dis-ease, disorder, disturbance, dysfunction, Essential Nature, Healing, imbalance, infection, infinitesimal heart fractures, inner light, Kinesiology, repressed emotions, thyroid, unconditional love

I’m not sure where in the world-wide-web the above image comes from, except that a friend sent it to me to share a little love from the other side of the world. Gorgeous, isn’t it?

Life is quite weird right now. I pretty much need all the love I can muster because I’m losing my bearings a little. But in a good way.

Thanks to the kinesiology work I’m doing (first with Kerry, then Amanda), I feel like there’s an awful lot of stuff shifting but it’s hard to explain exactly what that means. In fact, Kerry and I swapped a few messages on Twitter about just this topic today:

Svasti: Getting in ever deeper with the kinesiology work and the words don’t come as easily to explain.

Kerry: Sometimes you don’t know consciously what is shifting with the kinesiology. But shift things do!

Svasti: Oh. My. Word. Yes, they do!

Kerry: One client told me she doesn’t believe you can really know the true outcome of a session – more far reaching than you can tell.

Yep.

This fairly accurately sums up what’s going on, in that I’ve truly no idea. Well, except that “stuff” is being moved around and healed and released and so on…

Right now, we’re ostensibly focusing on healing my thyroid. But what’s coming up in my sessions is a LOT of stuff I thought I’d dealt with already and then things I didn’t even know about. Stuff within the depths of my hidden memories of childhood – you see, until I was about nine or ten, I don’t have many clear memories at all.

All of what’s coming up however, is emotional. Even/especially the stuff I don’t remember. Which is both not surprising and also blindingly “doh”!

For years, I’ve been talking about how repressed emotions cause dis-ease. It’s something I knew intuitively but I didn’t expect it would happen to me – until it did. After all, I live life with my heart on my sleeve like nobody’s business!

But it’s the secret ones – those terribly hurtful and painful stories we tell ourselves about life and our interpretations of the actions of others – those are the ones we furtively sequester and barely even admit to ourselves as thoughts, ideas or feelings that cause dozens of infinitesimal fractures in our heart.

Over the years those stories build and are built upon. They take on form and meaning that deeply wounds our Essential Nature. But because we swallowed these tiny poisonous arrows whole, we’ve never seen them for what they are. So they become infected and take down our mind and body; into imbalance, infection, disturbance, disorder, dysfunction and dis-ease.

Let me try to illustrate what I mean with one of my own stories.

Shall we being with my chronic insecurity? Born of growing up with totally dissociated/emotionally neglectful parents and a physically/verbally abusive brother. Lots of shit went down before I even turned twenty-one. Enough for a lifetime of healing. But by my mid-to-late twenties, I’d convinced myself I was done with all of that stuff! I was over it (yeah right!) and moving on. I was in the beginning of my “spiritual search” phase and I was all god-realmy with a “nothing can touch me” attitude.

Everything looked good on the surface until things started falling apart with the guy I was engaged to.

Here’s what came up in my kinesiology session – betrayal. The specific incident* was this:

From before I met my then-fiancé, I was performing as a professional belly-dancer every weekend and dancing several nights a week. Then I was injured and had to stop dancing for a while, which meant I put on a little weight. My fiancé had a real problem with this, despite the fact that he wasn’t in the best physical shape himself. When we met, he had a pot belly which he kept for our entire relationship (and beyond). I loved him anyway for his inner light, for who he was. But when I was the one putting on weight, he freaked just a little too much. In fact, one day a mutual friend of ours was visiting and while she was there he very bluntly told me that I needed to lose weight. I was humiliated and breathlessly angry. So was our friend.

Like I’ve said before, it’s a good thing I didn’t marry this charmer, eh?

The story isn’t exactly a nice one, but the thing is that it goes deeper than that. My fiancé’s words were an explosive missile direct-hit to the part of me that was – and perhaps still is to a much lesser degree – deeply insecure.

The story that’d been going around and around in my mind and body for years was this:

No one loves me for who I really am.

(Gimme a moment here folks… writing that just now had a HUGE cost attached…)

And here was solid gold “proof”: even my fiancé, the guy I thought of as my soul mate and who’d flown me halfway around the world to propose to me… even he didn’t love me for who I was. It wasn’t unconditional love. His feelings towards me began to change just because I put on a little weight!

This was the man I’d planned a thousand dreams with – our wedding, babies, our lives. How and where we’d bring up our children. The studies I’d do while I was at home with the babies. And so on.

I was confused, upset and sad. But most of all, I felt utterly betrayed. Even if I didn’t admit it to myself back then.

That hidden fissure in my heart (chronic insecurity) was put under immense pressure by this event. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it was both the beginning of the end of my engagement, and the point from which I was doomed to make increasingly bad choices about men in the future.

The ultimate bad choice in men led to being assaulted – and the rest of that story is where this blog began.

And this, folks, is what I’m unearthing in my kinesiology sessions. The deepest, darkest stories I’ve told myself about myself. Stories that cause illness of body and mind.

These secret ones.

For it’s not our easily revealed wounds that cause the most grievous injuries, but the ones we hold onto for dear life because we sincerely believe them to be true based on “evidence”.

There’s dozens of tiny stories like this that come out during each and every kinesiology session. Sometimes, I’ve no idea what they’re about – the above is just a more lucid example that I can kinda wrap my brain around. But the work is all like this…

~ / \ ~

* It’s too complicated to explain to y’all how this information is plucked from my mind and body in a kinesiology session as being THE thing to work on. But trust me, it isn’t random and it’s always spot on.

~Svasti

Throwing spaghetti at the wall

Tags

autoimmune, carbohydrates, dark night of the soul, dis-ease, gluten, Hashimoto’s, hypothyroidism, Kinesiology, metabolism, PTSD, spaghetti, sugar, throwing spaghetti at the wall, thyroid

Being a poetical type, I like to think of this as the twilight time of my thyroid diagnosis. There’s a little bit of light being cast by the moon, but it is kinda hard to see on account of the growing darkness (it’s always darkest before dawn, natch).

I could go on with the clichés – dark night of the soul and all that. But hey, I’ve had several of those already and they no longer freak me out…

But I reckon it fits: this is the twilight time, the settling dusk. While I do know what’s coming (sort of), it’s gonna be a while before sunrise makes an appearance.

Saw the doctor this morning for my blood test results and yessum, I hit the hypothyroid jackpot – Hashimoto’s – which is the autoimmune version of this dis-ease.

But then apparently, most people diagnosed with hypothyroidism will have Hashimoto’s. For whatever reason, that’s just how it is.

My naturopathic-MD friend, the one who described thyroid problems an epidemic? She wasn’t wrong. At least two of my friends also have the same condition. Another friend possibly does, but she hasn’t had the tests to confirm it yet. I had a lovely Skype chat with one of these friends on the weekend. It’s good to have some love and support from someone who’s been through it all.

Right now there’s a lot to digest. And hey, I get that this isn’t cancer (at least, probably not!) but it IS a life-long illness that requires constant monitoring and careful caring for my physical, mental and emotional well-being. Which is the sort of stuff we should all be doing for ourselves anyway, and yet most of us don’t. Until we have to, which is the boat I now find myself in along with millions of others.

Where to begin? Currently, this is where I’m at…

I’ve been taking hormone tablets for a month now. I’m quite ambivalent about that, being more into natural/alternative therapies and I honestly haven’t noticed that much difference since I started them. On the other hand, I did notice a significant difference when I began my epic consumption of vitamins/minerals/amino acids.

Symptom-wise, my energy is still up and down like a yo-yo. I need LOTS of sleep and always wake up tired. Even though I need sleep, I sometimes find it hard to stay asleep for a full eight hours. If I have a busy weekend or if I’m out after work a couple of nights in a row, the next night MUST be a rest night. It’s like a car running out of petrol – I simply stop. My monthly cycle still makes me feel like I’m about to die (no exaggeration). And of course, I am still not losing weight, no matter how well I eat and take care of myself.

I didn’t even really know what to ask my doctor today, despite all the reading I’ve done in the last month. I mentioned some of the research and information I’ve discovered, but it seemed like I had to prompt her to tell me anything useful.

Apparently cutting dairy is recommended in addition to sugar and gluten – these food stuffs are considered toxic for people with Hashimoto’s (lately, I’ve begun noticing my distaste for sugary anything). I also need to be careful with my consumption of carbohydrates (which are basically sugar). All of which – with the exclusion of gluten – is stuff people do to lose weight.

Someone even commented on Twitter that as a result of these changes, I’ll be skinny. BUT. But. This isn’t necessarily the case, because the thyroid is intimately involved with the metabolism, and my thyroid is faulty. It’s going to take time and a fair bit of trial and error to figure this all out and it still doesn’t mean I’ll be “skinny” when I do.

{Confession: there’s still a part of me that hopes my Hashimoto’s isn’t “that bad”. Which is disturbingly similar to how I viewed the beginning of my (undiagnosed at the time) slide into PTSD-land. Luckily I know better now.}

However in some ways this is true: currently I only have a mild level of autoimmune antibodies – which can easily become worse without appropriate treatment. My situation is complicated because I’m also ridiculously deficient in iron, B12, and vitamin D. So my doctor thinks it’ll be six months or so before we’ve got a better view of what’s going on.

I think I get it though – she’s trying not to overwhelm me with a billion pieces of information. She wants me to make small step-changes, bit by bit. But it’s hard, because I don’t want it to take so long and I like to know everything up front.

Next up for me is to get an ultrasound for my thyroid (there’s such a thing as thyroid cancer that needs to be ruled out), and see an endocrinologist who specialises in thyroid disorders.

I’ve got a referral, a bunch of test print outs and two extra supplements to take (selenium and Activated B6). I have another referral too; for a kinesiologist who has herself had thyroid issues. Also on my team is my acupuncturist.

There are other specialists that I’m getting in touch with as well… but my budget can only take so much at any one time!

So I guess this is throw the (gluten free) spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks time. I don’t know what will work yet and until I do, I’m gonna keep throwing spaghetti, if y’know what I mean…

~ Svasti

PTSD can cause real physical health problems

Tags

adrenal exhaustion, Anxiety, auto-immune, Ayurveda, Chronic stress, Depression, dis-ease, exhaustion, game on, gluten free, gluten intolerance, Healing, Health, himoto’s thyroiditis, hypothyroidism, leaky gut, PTSD, self-nurture, Spleen, thyroid, yang energy

It’s a little challenging sometimes to get the facts of life through this thick noggin of mine. For some reason, I’ve a tendency to not believe things are real.

So this whole: yes, my body is sicker than I was aware of thing is taking some getting used to. Of course I knew I was having bouts of exhaustion, but I hadn’t associated that with anything in particular. And thyroid issues it seems, are known to be difficult to diagnose because their symptoms often appear as other things – like depression and anxiety, for starters.

I’ve no way of knowing how long this has been going on, but based on my sketchy knowledge of Ayurveda I’d say it’s been a while. The organs and glands are not the first parts of the body to break down during dis-ease, but they’re also not the last.

What’s been really impressive has been the vast amount of information I’ve gathered from Twitter, including several excellent pieces of advice.

Three of the most important things I’ve learned in the last week are:

• Chronic stress can cause adrenal exhaustion, which in turn can trigger hypothyroidism and/or the auto-immune version of hypothyroidism, called Hashimoto’s thyroiditis.
• Generally associated with thyroidism is some level of gluten intolerance and/or leaky gut.
• There is PLENTY that a person can do other than take synthetic hormones to sort out this imbalance in the body.
  Here’s one woman’s story of what she did.

Bottom line #1: If you ever had any doubt about the body and mind being one and the same, seeing PTSD translate into a very real physical illness should be all the proof you require.

Bottom line #2: Never, ever, accept the standard western medical treatment without researching other options.

So far it’s been a wild learning curve and I know there’s plenty more to come.

Right now, I’m temporarily taking synthetic hormone medication for one month because it’s part of the protocol my current doctor wants me to follow. I’m not terribly happy about this! After that, I’ll have more blood tests to work out if I’ve got plain old hypothyroidism or Hashimoto’s.

In the meanwhile, I’m also taking a small army of supplements including:

• Olive leaf extract (which I’ve been taking for ages to support my immune system)
• Fish oil (another one I’ve been taking for ages – good for joints and cholesterol)
• L-Tyrosine – this made me feel SO. MUCH. BETTER. The almost ever-constant anxiety I was experiencing, that’d flare up without much cause is now gone. Yep, GONE. This is an amino acid and it’s referred to as “neuro-transmitter support”. It is incredible!
• Liquid iron (better for absorption, and doesn’t cause constipation like the tablet form. Also includes vitamin C in the blend) – related to adrenal exhaustion
• Magnesium – to support iron absorption
• Huge doses of B12 and vitamin D – which I am deficient in right now and this is also related to adrenal exhaustion

But that’s not all. I’m working with my acupuncture guy on my spleen/yang energy – which is also connected to the thyroid. He’s gonna give me some herbs and needles to see what can be done to support my body.

AND I’ve started – somewhat fitfully – eating gluten free. I can report that the first few days my body was having a little celebration at the change in my eating habits. I felt like it was literally singing to me!

But I’ve had to work out what’s okay and not okay to eat. Obviously things like bread are totally out (unless it’s gluten-free chia bread!), but other things I’d eat occasionally like dumplings, fries (cross-contamination issues), and even most potato chips are OUT. So is blue cheese (*cries*). My breakfast cereal, which I thought was okay as it was wheat-free, just isn’t. Barley and rye also have to go, you see.

The weird thing is that after even just a few days without gluten, then slipping up with stuff I wasn’t aware of… WOW, my belly hurts! That’d also be me just double checking to see if this thing is really REAL (thick noggin, remember?).

Interestingly, I noticed that I’d been having this sort of tight, bloated pain for a while. Only I hadn’t realised before now that this was a symptom of gluten intolerance. Amazing what we put up with, isn’t it?

So mostly I’m sticking to very simple meals – fish, organic chicken, rice, steamed veggies (drizzled with tahini – YUM!) and salads. Stuff like that. I’ve found a wonderful gluten free breakfast cereal and the previously mentioned chia bread. The other thing I’m meant to do is eat smaller meals more frequently.

Basically, I’m not taking any of this lying down (see bottom line #2). I’ve already got some leads on doctors that work more holistically when it comes to thyroid issues. So once I get my test results, I’ll probably switch doctors because I want someone who knows this stuff inside out and is prepared to go further than just giving me replacement hormones!

Food, exercise, proper rest, yoga and meditation – along with the appropriate supplements etc – all appear to be the way to go.

I’m also doing some work on my self-nurture abilities: today I had an awesome “me” day! Post-yoga class, I had myself a lovely time – getting my eyebrows waxed, a massage, going to a movie, buying some lovely fruit tea, a new light for my push bike, and wandering at a leisurely pace back towards my part of the world.

Game on, people. It’s game-freakin’-on.

~Svasti