Your Personal Power Looks Good on You!

A couple weeks ago I was thumbing through blouses at Nordstrom Rack. I had a gift card to burn, and while I normally pride myself on being a re-used clothing enthusiast, I was having fun shopping. But as I looked through racks of crop tops and droopy sweater robes, I thought, I hate this stuff. None of this is ME.

My best friend Jackie and I have been taking Tan France’s Masterclass on how to style yourself. Jackie and I both joke that we have been dressing like little boys for most of our adulthood and it’s maybe time to throw out the ratty thrift store sweaters and dress a little more like the confident, smart women we are. Tan France has two style rules: know your proportions and wear what feels like you. 

All of this has reminded yet again of the golden truth of healing: In all things, you have to be who you really are.  I have always been a tomboy at heart. I go for simple neutrals that are easy to move in- kinda like a feminine lumberjack. So that day at Nordstrom, I slid a well-fitting rose shirt over to the cashier, already knowing I’d wear it with jeans and boots and feel perfectly like myself.

I’ve written about that provocative statement before -- you gotta be yourself in order to heal -- because it hit me right between the eyes when I first read from author Amy Scher. What? What does being myself have anything to do with killing off a bacterial infection?

Curious, I’ve been closely watching for what happens in moments when I’m not being quite myself. When I say something is okay when it really isn’t. For when I agree to go out when my body longs to be soaking in a hot bath instead. 

Here’s what happens: My power goes out a little bit. My trust and safety within myself are dimmed. 

The nervous system, as we hear so often these days, can get activated and stuck in modes of fight, flight or freeze after any sort of trauma - emotional or physical, big or small. Healing can’t happen when we’re in freak out mode. 

But I’m finding an ever-so-subtle element of nervous system dysregulation can also happen when I’m not acting, talking, behaving (or dressing!) like myself. 

The more I tune in with my preferences, taste, boundaries and needs, the more I become who I truly am.

For the person who has been sick a really long time, finding your sources of power is super duper important. I found I let my power continually get zapped out of me over the last ten years as I’ve struggled to “move forward” through the culturally prescribed rites of adulthood. My entire working life, for one, has felt like a giant flop - me always extending myself with shooting-star ambition in times of health, only to have to draw back under the covers when my body crumbles. 

Only, I’m changing that now. As I harness more resolve to heal permanently and completely, I’m coming to see that being who I really am means embracing where I really am in my life. And that place still carries some tough physical limitations. It’s still painful to walk down the street most days.


As my friend Lizzie and I laid in the golden Indian Summer sun over the weekend, we talked about things we’re working to overcome. Mostly old ways of thinking. ”I’d feel so free,” I told her, tearing up a bit, “if I could live without this constant devil on my shoulder that’s asking me: ‘What are you  doing with your life? What are you achieving?’”

My power -- to be fully myself, to be fully where I am, to love my life even if my health isn’t awesome -- is on the other side of those shitty, cold-hearted questions.  

My invitation to you  - anyone recovering from an illness or enduring something really hard  -  is to identify the one daily snag that's keeping you from being your powerful, radiant, lovely self.

If you don’t know already, it’s likely that critical and anxious thought you think about yourself or your life everyday - and usually first thing in the morning. 

When I woke up this morning, I felt the instant prick of the what-are-you-doing-with-your-life thorn. But this time, I caught it. I can feel those harsh judgments shrinking like one of my old thrift store sweaters. They just don’t fit me anymore. That’s not who I am.

So. What am I doing with my life? I hardly need to defend that question anymore. Trust in a beautiful, healthful future looks so much better on me. 


Want to receive Forager newsletters? Okay! You can subscribe here. 

You do you, y’all. Me with my ducks. Nate’s finger covering the lens.

The Space Between the Signposts

Years ago I worked as a wilderness guide in the San Juan Mountains. On Saturday nights all the guides, sunburned and sore, recovered from a week on the trail by sharing a hearty family-style meal. The after-dinner movie on the big projector was a heavenly treat we all looked forward to, but only got to enjoy if your gear was packed for yet another group to arrive early the next morning. 

On one particular Saturday night, I forgoed the movie after being assigned a particularly challenging trail to guide that week. I spent the evening with my guide partner, Tanner, and other guides who had hiked the Goose Lake route and had “beta” to share about its challenges.  Tanner and I traced our fingers along dirty topographical maps and scribbled down detailed notes as the advice poured in. 

“You’re going to feel like you’re lost,” someone advised us. “You will be lost,” another guide joked. “There’s literally no trail the entire time.” Tanner and I exchanged a look of worry. 

A couple days later, after hours of hiking through thick forests, I saw the very same look in the eyes of the kids in our group -  only this time it was worry mixed with a bit of annoyance.

 “Hang on. Let’s pause here.” I said, nodding to Tanner that it was time for a guide meeting. The kids released their packs to the ground and I passed a bag of trail mix around the circle to keep the peace.

 “Are we lost?” one girl whined. 

“Just drink some water!” we called back to them as we scouted deeper into the woods. Out of earshot from the kids, we admitted to each other that we both had no idea where we were, not even close, not even for a minute. 

“You doing okay?” Tanner asked me, wiping the sweat from his forehead. I realized then that I was more than okay - I was actually reveling in the intensity of the day. As precarious as it was to be lost in the backwoods with 14 hungry teenagers, it also made me rush with life. 

We made a plan to each do some reconnaissance work - Tanner trekking west and me north until we found some kind of signpost to orient us. As I scouted alone in the woods, I felt both aware of the weight of my responsibility for getting us out of this mess and the bold confidence that somehow a way would open.

When we eventually spotted the faint path leading to Goose Lake, the sweat was cooling on our backs as the sun dipped over the crest. Spirits were low and the trail mix bag had run empty hours ago. As Goose Lake appeared like a mirage on the horizon, pure and purple and majestic, the kids erupted in joy and ran to splash at its shore. But I hung back and looked down at the harsh and impossibly rugged valley we had just passed through, bowing to it with reverence for carrying us through. 

Not Goose Lake, but just as stunning. Photo by vishal amin

I believe we are always being guided forward - that even when we’re feeling lost there is a sacred “threadedness” to the space between the signposts.

Many people with chronic illness and chronic pain know well the experience writer and coach Noelle Janka calls “the chase.” It’s when your current protocol isn’t working and it’s time to go back to the drawing board to find a new plan. It can provoke a lot of lostness.

I’m in the chase right now - totally mystified by the ghostly qualities of the pain I’m experiencing (yesterday here, today there) and without a plan for how to get it to go away. I am in the space between signposts, and let me tell you - it does not feel thrilling or life giving at all. It feels depressing and scary.

And yet. When I look back at the arc of healing in my life, I see as clear as day that so many old chronic symptoms are now long gone. And that most of the things I have overcome were always laced with threads of perfectly-timed guidance - that Internet post perfectly describing my pain patterns, a friend’s encouragement who healed from the same issue, a hunch, a guess, or a risk to try a new doctor. Like perfectly placed clues, these things all led me to cross more and more symptoms off my list over the years. 

Yesterday, Nate and I drove out to a state park to go hiking in celebration of his 35th birthday. I couldn’t make it more than five minutes past the trailhead before I had to surrender to just how uncomfortable I felt. Nate hiked the rest alone, and I sat by the side of a trickling creek. Here I am again, I thought.  Lost in the woods in an entirely new way. 

Being lost and found, of course, mean entirely new things to me than they did ten years ago when I was a guide. Then, I lived in a blissful state of found-ness: healthy and largely unscarred by life, a day’s dip into disorientation was a welcome challenge. Of course a way out of the woods would open, because life was friendly, wide and open. 

Lostness as I know it today - scary states of not knowing what will heal- feels like a far more rigorous emotional territory to navigate. 

Thankfully, I have learned to carry some pretty powerful tools for when I get lost. 

The best compass I know for staying on course is to practice being soft with myself instead of hard on myself. Less “Ugh, why can’t I figure this out?” and more “Hey, you didn’t have the stamina for that six months ago!” 

The best smoke signals I can send up are prayers for guidance: God, please keep showing me the way forward, please see me, help me.

The best mental map I can use is the vision of me dancing on top of an epic mountain top with Nate.

The best whistle I can wear is the freedom to call out for help and support at any time.

The best trail I know to follow is my razor-sharp intuition which always knows the next right thing I need to do for myself.

The best guide I could ever have is myself. 

Being a wilderness guide taught me so much about how to survive in the backcountry. But once I mastered the “hard” skills of moutaineering, leading kids and adults through the wildnerness felt so effortless and easy because I knew my stuff and I trusted myself. Yes, we all “survived” out there, but it always felt more like practicing trust all day long.

I think it’s the same way with navigating illness. When we discover our personal medicines and trust our innner and outer guides, the healing experience stops feeling like we’re just trying to survive our lives. We can ease up a bit. We can know how to be lost and found at the same time.

To Heal You Need to Be Who You Truly Are

I’ve been spending my mornings like this: I get up, I kiss Nate, I fill a French press with steaming hot mint tea, and I sit at my desk. I spend an hour reading or writing, but mostly I work on the energy medicine practices I’m learning from Amy Shuer’s fantastic book, How to Heal Yourself When No One Else Can.

I make sure I keep the door closed because it all looks a bit crazy: Amy has me tapping on my chakras to free constricted energy, holding my thymus gland while I release unprocessed events buried in my subconscious, and chanting feel-good mantras louder and louder and louder. I do whatever the hell Amy tells me to do, because her book is gold and contains some of the most important insights on healing I’ve ever read .

Amy also had Lyme for ten years and observed that when all the hardcore physical medicine doesn’t work, maybe the body alone isn’t what’s causing the illness. Using a grounded, practical approach to energy medicine, she healed herself. I’m also finding energy medicine to be a big missing piece of my puzzle.

When I got to the part of the book when she explains the one thing you MUST do for all the tapping and woo woo to work, I noticed I resisted her key message: “To permanently and completely heal, you need to be who you truly are. You must be the real you. That means to love, accept and be yourself no matter what. No light-dimming or living small allowed.” 

I’ve been thinking about that long and hard, using my brain to try to untangle the mystery of it as if it’s a ball of headphones tangled at the bottom of my purse. That’s actually how I try to solve most of my problems: analyze, make lists, poll friends, hire experts, Google it.

My husband will tell you that I have a bit of a what-do-you-think-I-should-do problem. It tends to be my preference to trust the guidance of others over myself. My morning energy medicine work has me looking more closely at this impulse.

But, dang it, I just love to be supported. I can’t help it. My friend Sarah once jokingly called my team of doctors and practitioners my “staff,” -- though I like to think of them as the trusted individuals who sit at my “healing roundtable” - something I created after I got the idea from by Dr. Lissa Rankin. These are the professionals and friends I’ve intentionally gathered to field questions, try out experimental therapies, and bring me across the finish line to health.

I am completely confident that you can’t heal from any complex chronic disease without a trusted circle of love and professional support - as long as you’re always the one at the head of the table with the final word. My trouble is that I love to outsource so much that I can easily lose touch with my inner authority. 

I’m pretty sure I stopped trusting myself somewhere in between growing up in a culture that praised me for being a rule-following good girl and being told over and over again there was nothing wrong with me while I felt like shit. 

Becoming more of me is requiring me to burn away those parts that seek input when I already have the answer within me. Author Glennon Doyle calls it “the knowing.” She writes: “I understand now that no one in the world knows what I should do. The experts don’t know, the ministers, the therapists, the magazines, the authors, my parents, my friends - they don’t know. Not even the folks who love me the most. Because no one has ever lived or will ever live this life I am attempting to live with my gifts and challenges and past and people…. This life is mine alone, so I have stopped asking people for directions to the places they’ve never been.” Amen.

As I weave together the discipline of owning my instincts with the teachings of energy medicine, I’m discovering just how poetic the body’s use of metaphors can be.

In energy medicine, hip pain is linked to not moving forward in life. Because our hips carry our lower body forward, they can also be connected to a fear of not being able to support and trust ourselves in our pursuits. And as it happens, I’ve been seriously debilitated with hip pain for about five years. 

My specialist sees the hip pain as a Lyme infection entrenched deep in the tissues of my hip, but I’m not looking past the energetic metaphor going on here. Stuckness has been the name of the game for me. Pain and low energy have epically derailed my attempts at a “proper career,” and that’s left me feeling chronically purposeless because, like most of us, I was conditioned to believe that not working a big important job means not being a valuable contributor to society.

So, here’s my energy medicine prescription for myself: Lindsay, to be who you really are, you’ve got to trust that you always know the next right thing to do. 

Will that heal the hip pain? Maybe. But it does have the power to change the course of my life, to unstick me, to make me more of me - and that feels absolutely thrilling.

A Life Shaped by Time at Home

I’ve been at home for a long time. 

After I got sick in 2010 and had to leave my life in Nashville, I spent a year in my childhood bedroom kicking and screaming, desperate to be back dancing in Tennessee honky tonks. That year, I booked about ten flights for trips I couldn’t physically handle, then cancelled them as I wept on the floor unpacking my suitcase. The denial years! 

Then there were the sad years. I remember them as a blur of Dexter episodes in my parents dimly lit basement while I nursed a sore throat with warm salty water.

Next, the social years - the I’ve-got-to-get-the-hell-out-of-the-house and live my life years. I can just see the montage of so many fake-smile, just-act-cool, keep-it-together dates…followed by collapsing on the couch for days as I recovered.

I was in bad shape. I was sick all the time. No one could figure it out. While my friends took cool jobs in big cities, I passed my days mastering my use of the remote control. I hated it. I hated being home.

After five years, I still couldn’t find a name for why I felt like shit all the time, so I figured it was time to change my relationship to being home. 

And when I say being at “home,” I really mean being with myself.

I was lucky to have some wiser, older people in my life who had already survived some really hard things. One of them, Mark, kept reminding me that slowness was what the world needed most and that I could teach slowness with my life. 

I didn’t want to be slow, though. I wanted to be free and fast! It took even more miserable months in bed for me to surrender to the new rhythms of my Benjamin Button existence - I needed quiet conversations, slow walks and an afternoon nap. I was 85 at 26.

Eventually, I moved out of my parents’ house and into my own place, working as a freelancer at the front of my apartment in the morning and sleeping like a dog in back of my apartment through the afternoons. And as totally exhausted as I felt, I forced myself to go out almost every night - seeing friends, taking a yoga class - doing anything I could to NOT be at home. Home was scary because home meant being alone and that meant I’d likely feel pretty depressed about how sick I was.

Something began to shift for me when I read Paul Elie’s epic four-part biography The Life You Save May Be Your Own. I read it twice. I loved it. I saw myself in Thomas Merton’s questioning search for meaning and in the dusty, southern slowness of Flannery O’Connor’s creative life. The book sparked my interest in these writers' practice of contemplative spirituality- or whatever it was that transformed these suffering people into such bearers of light.  Over the next few years I found myself in the deep armchairs of spiritual directors, walking the quiet plains of a Missouri Benedictine monastery, and ditching church for the garden.

I wondered: What if living with chronic illness can be like choosing to live in a monastery of my own making?

One morning I sat on a pillow in a sunlit square of my apartment. I stayed silent and centered, but also felt bored and wildly distracted. It was nothing life changing, but it felt good enough for me to keep coming back every morning. 

Soon enough, I stopped going out so much. At night I took long candle-lit baths, soaking my tired body and repeatedly thanking it for all it did for me to keep me alive. I wrote more, I read more and I cooked so much I began to make my own ketchup from scratch.

I blame it all on the pillow. In meditation, I could receive a lot of sweetness from the only one who knew how bad things sucked : I see how much you’re suffering. We are going to figure this out. I love you so much. 

The more I sat in silence, the more I came to love being at home. As home felt safer, I felt safer, and being sick felt safer.

Being stuck at home is being stuck with ourselves - and that can be a comforting or a terrifying experience. 

The quarantine is bringing up all kinds of emotional material for each of us. Some people are using this time to ramp up their productivity and clean out their linen closet. Others are zonked out on the couch getting much needed rest, poor things. 

Without making suggestions about how anyone should conduct themselves during this global crisis, here’s one thing I know for sure: we do the most important work of our lives at home. 

Home is where we do the mundane, physical work to keep life in order, like unloading the dishwasher, huffing laundry baskets up the stairs, and matching socks (my least favorite chore). 

And home - especially right now - is also the space for pausing, resting and investing in our core relationships - primarily the relationship we have with ourselves.  

All of this makes me think of the great quote from the philosopher Blaise Pascal: “All of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.”

Maybe you have four kids and chronic migraines and you’re like, “Please, girl. I would love to be quiet in a room by myself this week.” 

But I think the opportunity to connect with our inner self can actually happen in the throes of daily tasks - or more so in the lulls between those tasks.

As a super pragmatic person, I’m all about meeting people where they are with any invitation I offer.  So, here’s a small thing I’m playing with right now: I’m trying to observe what I do when I’m feeling bored at home.

I notice I almost always reach for my phone. Don’t you?

But when I can resist the temptation to grab my phone, I’m always pleased to find what’s waiting for me on the other side of my boredom -- sometimes it’s an idea for the garden, other times a reminder to reach out to a friend. It’s always something more fulfilling than scrolling mindlessly as I sit on the toilet and my legs fall asleep.

On days I let my mindlessness turn me into a robot, I can easily get lost in the tidal wave of scary headlines or notifications. Soon enough, the day is gone and I couldn’t really tell you what I was feeling all day, but I can bet there’s a bit of fear or worry lurking just below the surface - for me and for you.

Time at home has a funny way of showing you where it’s time to do some work on yourself. In my life, limitations have been the precursors to possibilities. Tense relationships can soften after enough awkward dinners. Loneliness can lift into solitude. Restlessness can be surrendered into much needed rest.

We all could be at home for a while. You might want to find yourself a pillow.

x

Lindsay

Forager Newsletter

Announcing Forager Newsletter

Hi! I have a newsletter! Forager is my newsletter about widsom and tools for healing I’ve gathered during my decade long journey with Lyme disease. It’s written for folks with chronic, complex health challenges in mind, but certainly pertains to anyone seeking health and vitality.

You can sign up for Forager here. I’ll also be posting each newsletter here on my blog. Thanks!

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I’m told there’s a dilapidated old hospital in the deep woods of the Ozarks. In the 19010’s a doctor established the Welch Spring Hospital as a bucolic respite for the sick. He believed that the fresh spring waters of the Current River were a potent medicine. The story goes that he planted wild herbs on the hospital forest grounds for medicine making, and with the right knowledge of herbs, you can still forage for wild ginger and other medicinals on the abandoned hospital grounds.  

Traditionally, a forager is someone who sets out in nature to identify and gather wild provisions, like a springtime morel or juicy October permission.

I’ve often thought of foraging as the ideal metaphor for understanding the journey of healing from chronic illness. In my decade long search for answers I’ve gathered an abundance of wisdom and knowledge about how to heal from chronic disease -- but my journey has been more of a long and weary pilgrimage than a leisurely walk in the woods. 

As we endeavor to search for the root causes of our illness, the environmental factors keeping us sick, and the emotional layers to our disease, we become initiated as true foragers - people on a quest for the remedies that can heal us and the person we're called to become along the course of our pursuit.

As foragers facing invisible illnesses like Lyme, chronic pain and autoimmune diseases, we walk along an entirely different path than people without health challenges. 

We learn to become masters at gathering information - diagnoses, medical advice, treatment plans - and use our razor-sharp discernment skills to choose what to keep in our basket and what to toss to the wind.

We develop an expertise in the field, knowing exactly what to pick in a landscape of false promises and true healers. 

We intuitively know what’s best for our bodies without consulting the “ID book” or any outer authority. 

We know the desperation going it alone in the deep dark woods. We wander off course, we grow weary, and we often want to give up the search. 

We enjoy a special, sacred connection to our bodies and the natural world as we learn to fine-tune our system with whole foods and good medicine, sleep and sunshine. 

But, more than anything, we have gathered a bounty of wisdom to share with the world about how to heal. 

In this regular newsletter, I’m excited to share from my basket and write about the many things I’ve experimented with over the last ten years as I’ve worked on my recovery from Lyme disease. For seven of those years, I didn’t have a diagnosis and I’m just now connecting with all the stored stress and trauma that accumulated for me and does for many who are tossed around a system largely useless at helping folks with chronic “invisible” illnesses. 

If I can do anything to help you toward diagnostic clarity, ways to access your intuition and inner authority when making medical decisions, or even how to properly sweat and poop out toxins, I’ve done my job! 

Most of the super useful, change-your-life knowledge I have about healing has been handed down to me from other health foragers, so if you know someone struggling with Lyme, chronic pain or other autoimmune issues, please encourage them to subscribe. 

Reconnecting with my Nervous System from the 90’s

Reconnecting with my Nervous System from the 90’s

I feel so grateful that I got to enjoy a free-range childhood. With a neighborhood pool and ample commonground to play Ghost in the Graveyard, my suburban subdivision offered my friends and me a lot of free rein to run wild. But there was one condition: we had to be home by sundown, right before the fireflies came out. Time felt so much more abstract back then. Unlike most kids growing up today, the only kind of alerts or notifications we received were when our moms called the payphone at the pool and the lifeguard yelled, “Michael Bowman, it’s time to go home!”

I’ve been trying to reconnect with what my nervous system felt like in the 90’s. I feel fortunate to be the last generation that grew up without the internet and that so much of my formative years were filled with daydreamy, even boring, hours that didn’t feel like hours at all - they were just unmeasured afternoons outside running around. I slept like a rock, I spent most of my time outside and by the end of the summer my hair was tinted green with chlorine. I was a happy kid. I love to think about my fourth grade class picture: I’m flashing a big gap between my two front teeth, sporting a hair wrap with purple beads, and wearing a bright tie-dye shirt. (Mom forgot it was picture day.) For the most part, my nervous system was in a free flow of pleasure and play, rest and digest - a parasympathetic sweet spot. 

Of course, now with the responsibilities of adulthood and the scars of chronic illness, those days feel like distant sepia-toned memories. But as I’ve learned through brain retraining programs like Dynamic Neural Retraining System, when we can fully access those sunny memories through consistent states of deep meditation, the brain doesn’t know the difference between then and now. Deeply focusing on a positive memory or a creating a "safe space" meditation can flood our nervous systsem with the “happy hormones” - oxytocin, dopamine, and serotonin - and those good feelings integrate into our present reality, inviting a busy, frantic mind to ease into a relaxed, parasympathic state. 

Very often people facing health challenges will get stuck in an overactive limbic system loop (some call it chronic fight or flight). While doing DNRS, I found it super interesting to learn that people with limbic system dysfunction (myself included) are always aware of two things: their environment and the time. We’re on high alert because our brains believe that our setting determines our safety. Our brains crave a secure, predictable setting with plenty of time to rest, recover. The less surprises, the better.

So, with that bit of knowledge about how the nervous system works when it’s in overdrive, I’ve been experimenting with ways to slow down my rushed relationship to time and bring it back to the 90's.... 

Here’s an example: My impulse to rush - whether in traffic or through writing an email - is way that my brain tends to animate its sympathetic, fight or flight state. Folks with Limbic system impairment (or honestly anyone just living in this fast paced world!) will have about a thousand opportunities a day to observe their unique patterns of rushing.

So, here’s what the experiment looks like for me:

• Enjoying the slow lane. I’m trying to give myself 10 or 15 minutes to arrive somewhere early, and enjoying phone-free time when I get there. Rushing and worrying about being late leads to shallow breathing and it’s way we keep pushing that sympathetic pedal, revving up our nervous system up, and signaling to the brain that we are in danger when we’re really just five minutes late for a meeting. I’m finding that when I don’t rush the clock, I’m much more present and in my body in all my meetings or appointments.

• Covering the clocks. Since it's winter and harder to immerse yourself totally in nature (which is heaven for the nervous system),  I’ve been trying to give myself one day a week in which I turn my phone off for half the day or all day (if possible). This may sound weird for someone without any kind of nervous system dysregulation, but again, for me, it’s all about entering into that spacious, relaxed state of my childhood when time didn’t matter and there wasn’t the rush to be anywhere. Even if I’m running errands and I’ve left my phone at home, the energy is totally more relaxed and peaceful than when I’m checking my phone at every pause in traffic. Anyone?

• Avoiding unnecessary alerts. I'm challenging my impulse to text to say “I’m leaving now” or will “Be there in five minutes.” This is so not the way of the 90s! Sure, there will always be changes in plans. People will be late.  But, as my beloved zen husband reminds me, “We’re going to get there when we get there!” 

• Soaking in more healthy brain habits. I’m working on not looking at my phone for 20 - 60 minutes when I first wake up in order to stay in my creative sweet spot. Thomas Edison found the space between waking and sleeping to be his most dynamic creative brain space. When he napped, he held heavy stainless steel balls in his hands that would drop as his body relaxed into sleep, waking him up to a state of consciousness in which he said he came up with his best inventions. Along with the creative downloads waiting for you in that liminal waking space, there are a lot of health benefits to separating buzzling technologies from the bedroom, where our nervous and immune systems do their deep repair work. 

• None of this is easy - you’ll see! Try one practice this week. I’d love to hear how it goes for you. 

What’s in my foraging basket right now:

• These amazing plant-based, gluten free, dairy free pizza crusts

• Toots and the Maytals on repeat to welcome spring weather (Just found out they are coming to St. Louis!)

• The new(ish) podcast Poetry Unbound with the lovely Pádraig Ó Tuam

Got a loved one healing from a chronic illness  who would benefit from reading Forager?

Send them here to subscribe. Thank you!

Building a Movement Rich Life

Last weekend, I got to study with one of my all time heroes, Katy Bowman. Katy is a biomechanist and the author of eight books, including one of the most important books I’ve ever read, Move Your DNA.

Here we are on a hike practicing our pelvic lists and gait patterns…I’m in the back observing a slug!

But before all of that — before traveling to the Olympic Peninsula to attend the workshop, before dropping Nate off in the pouring rain at a deep woods trailhead for three days for a solo backpacking trip, before taking the risk to participate in a very active weekend despite life with chronic pain - it all started with my feet.

About three years ago, I joined the leagues of one out of four women who have foot ongoing pain. It was bad. Plantar fasciitis so sharp, so achy, so painful that I couldn’t walk around my house without wearing these bad boys. 

There I was, a 29 year old walking around with geriatricly-thick orthotics engineered to support my feet from caving in, overpronating or really doing anything a foot is created to do.

Nothing about wearing the orthotics felt right or healthy or natural. (Where is the template in nature for orthotics?) But, I was in so much pain that I didn’t have any other options, so I stuffed them in my running shoes and went along with it. 

And then I had a wake up call. My friend Cristina introduced me to Correct Toes, toe spreaders that help rehabilitate your feet to back into the feet you were born with - strong feet! Flexible feet! Feet that function more like a tripod-trampoline, with the big toe strong enough to do a lot of the stabilizing work. (This is not a paid promotion for Correct Toes - although I wish it were!) After about nine months of wearing Correct Toes and transitioning to all minimalist footwear (shoes that are flexible, totally flat and have a wide toe box), my feet healed beautifully. 

That got my attention. What else is possible for my healing if my body can move like it was made to move? What would it mean to restore my body to the functionality of my hunter-gatherer ancestors?

The foot pain, as much grief as it caused me, was a powerful gateway drug to the work of Katy Bowman, the headmistress of “nutritious movement” - the idea that, just like we need a varied, nutrient-rich diet to be well, our bodies also require diversified movements to be well - and that “exercise” is only a tiny portion of those movements.

Which led me to reading tons of her books and devouring episodes to her podcast. 

Which led me to stop exercising and start adding more movement my day.

Which led me to throw those crazy orthotics in the trash.

Which led me to really understand Katy’s central message: OUR BODIES ARE SHAPED MY OUR ENVIRONMENT.

Now, watch this five minute video in which Katy masterfully explains why you are how you move!

GETTING MY CASTS OFF
To me, the orthotics serve as a perfect symbol of a medical paradigm that only looks at the part and not the whole. Your feet are weak and caving in? Let’s put them in casts to manipulate them back into correct form instead of considering the forces and loads placed on your body from your environment all day, everyday.

That means looking at the physical terrain you walk everyday (all flat floors OR sloped, rocky, textured surfaces?), the postures you hold outside of one hour of exercise (slumping over on the couch OR still using your muscles to sit upright on the floor while you watch TV?), and your lifestyle (drive to the store OR carry your child on your back while you walk there?)

By the way, I’ve encountered this “orthotic” effect dozens of times in other areas of medicine as healthcare is siloed into such “‘parts-focused” specializations. I think of the time my neurologist readily wrote me powerful prescriptions for my migraines without asking about my diet. Or, during a two year saga with sinus infections, my ENT pushed several rounds of antibiotics with no inquiry into my home environment, gut health or allergies. Real healing rarely happens when the focus is on the part and not the whole!

My transition to minimalist shoes and the strengthening of my feet led me to consider the other “casts” I’m using to unnecessarily support my body.

Living and working on an organic farm has certainly created a more movement rich environment for my body, but I found that during breaks and in the evening, I was making a habit of slumping into chairs while I ate dinner or collapsing into the couch. I also observed that even my kitchen was set up so that minimal squatting, bending, lifting or any kind of exertion was required. Once I got home, I basically stopped using my body.

Katy Bowman is all about furniture free living - more on that here - and so Nate and I are slowly transitioning our home environment here on the farm into a space with more opportunities for movement. Our bed is on the floor (more getting up and down from the floor that way!). We read and eat meals mostly sitting on the floor (more back strength and more chances to get up and down). I work on my computer lying on a sheepskin rug with a bolster under my hip bones (gettin’ after that prone hip extension). Katy says: “Why style my house in a way that’s gotten rid of so many movements only to have to do them all later, after something in my body is broken?” All of these adjustments to our home life have been easy to play with as we live in a rented house for the growing season. So, when we get back to St. Louis to our furniture-full house we will have to make new decisions about to transition, but I already have the feeling that our bodies will have changed so much by being furniture free this summer that chairs, couches and stools are going to feel like….more casts!

MOVING…WITH PAIN 

Because most the the writing I do is for and about people with chronic complex illnesses, I am excited about sharing Katy Bowman’s ideas about movement to people in pain. I think these slow and methodical approaches to movement can be super useful ways to rehabilitate bodies that have been bedridden or severely limited in their functionality.

Our bodies are made to move, but pain can feel like a red-hot warning sign that keeps us in a state of stagnancy for fear of causing more pain or long term damage. Or sleepless nights, in my case.

In her book Move Your DNA, Katy Bowman offers 40 corrective exercises to counteract the postures and patterns that stem from our convenience-riddled lives (or bedrest-riddled lives). Most of these are gentle and can be done lying on the floor. These exercises are small “vitamins” are intended to build your body up to be able to carry out the larger movements that Katy considers the macronutrients of nutritious movement: walking, squatting, hanging and carrying. 

Many people healing from long term illnesses - myself included - may find themselves learning to use their bodies again for the first time in a long time. Instead of feeling daunted by my weak core muscles and tight hamstrings, I’m choosing to see this as an awesome opportunity to re-enter a movement rich life with even more body awareness and knowledge, even at age 31! These lifestyle changes, the new shoes and the corrective exercises are all ways to not only recover from pathogenic disease but diseases of affluence and convenience that have molded our bodies into states of weakness and deficiency. 

So! Read Move Your DNA. I am loving experiencing life as a series of nutritious movements - the walking to the store, bending to tie my shoe, cutting flowers, carrying buckets, petting kitties, squatting in front of the oven, chopping wood, picking berries, cooking radishes, touching my toes, scooping ice cream, braiding my hair, spraying the hose, doing lunges up hills, nutritious, practical, functional, heal-your-cells, change-your-life kind of movements.

Doesn’t that sound so much better than 30 minutes on the elliptical??

Free and Inexpensive Tools for Healing Lyme

Last week I had a revelatory dream: I stood outside a white chapel with a big bronze bell in front of it and a sign that read “pain relief” alongside the name of an MD. People in the village revered the doctor for his power to heal any pain, but he very rarely opened the door. “He doesn’t see patients anymore,” someone said to me. “But when he does, he always treats them for free.”

I was so desperate, so consumed with my pain that I rang the bell with fervor. Just then the door opened and a man stood in the doorway. He waved to me, welcoming me in. Lying me down on a blue cot, he looked at me with compassion and said “You have been in pain so long,” and I wept. 

He put his hands on my eyes and told me to take a big, deep breath. As I exhaled he pushed with great force into my eyes and I felt a big energetic release as my body. I saw all the years of pain flash before my eyes. The pain flushed out of my body and at once I felt at ease.

And then we sat in a meditation position and did a funny mischievous little dance!

But soon another bodyworker came into the room and began to work on me. After the session, he told me I owe him $400. I became overwhelmed with panic. How will I pay him? I thought this was free?

I left the chapel feeling sad and fearful. I felt tricked by the bodyworker, and the pain came flooding back. 

—

This was a dream about free healthcare! The dream showed me just how much the enormous expense of treatment can inhibit healing. It’s hard to heal when the medicine only pressurizes your stress level. 

Here’s a sad truth I think about everyday: treating chronic, complex illnesses like Lyme requires some serious cash. And if you don’t have the financial resources or if you face racial / class / accessibility barriers preventing you from seeing expensive specialists, paying for copious amounts of supplements and getting IV treatments at $250 a pop, the odds are against your recovery. I’ve never met a patient to have a Lyme appointment covered by insurance, and I’ve never met anyone who has healed without a hefty price tag.

And because Lyme can mimic any and all diseases, expressing itself with hundreds of symptoms, it’s often known as the “Great Imitator.” On average, it takes a patient seven years to get diagnosed and, once you have a confirmed treatment plan it’s only the beginning of big bills. 

One of my passions is finding a way to help low-income people heal. I am receiving treatment at Holistic Healing Arts, a naturopathic clinic in Seattle specializing in Lyme. The treatment is outstanding, but it’s also treatment very few people will be able to afford. I’m only able to receive this treatment because of income coming from Nate’s partial ownership of his family business. As an organic farmer and a freelance writer, there’s no way Nate and I would be able to afford it on our income alone. 

In the years before I had Nate’s support, I had to rely heavily on my parents to help with paying medical bills. And I had to find a way to support myself. I worked through the first eight years of my undiagnosed illness, piecing together a living with writing, coaching and teaching gigs, living in shitty cockroach-filled apartments, painfully emptying my checking account each month as I wrote checks to doctors who did nothing at all to help me. I’ve been on food stamps, I’ve had to fundraise money to see specialists and I’ve often opted out of therapies and tests because they were too expensive. In the last nine years, my family and I have easily spent over a hundred grand on treatment. It’s the same story with most late-stage chronic Lyme patients I meet.

In this post - and in light of my dream - I want to offer all the Lyme resources I know about that are free or inexpensive. It’s a shameful reality that people who are debilitatingly sick have to become debilitatingly broke to be well.  I have tried dozens of different treatments and therapies and here are some of the tools I believe to be the best uses of your time and money. 

FREE 

• Upcoming webinar!  When I expressed this issue of treatment inaccessibility / class barriers to recovery to my Lyme specialist here in Seattle, he generously offered to donate his time to do a webinar sharing tools for recovery for people who can’t afford expensive therapies. Look out for that soon!! You will love him! 

• Insight Timer app. A wonderful free tool for mental health, breath work and nervous system regulation. I clocked over 400 sessions of meditation on this baby last year, and it helped me tremendously through really bad flare ups when all I could do was lie in bed for weeks. I love meditations from Jennifer Piercey (amazing yoga yidra meditations for sleep), Jack Kornfield, and Tara Brach.

• Ask for a free consultation with your practitioner. Don’t fork out hundreds of dollars before you ask for the opportunity to gather more information about your doctor / herbalist / acupuncturist’s background, technique and experience treating your set of issues. If you are treating Lyme, make sure you see a “Lyme Literate MD or ND” instead of someone who has a basic understanding of Lyme. You will waste your money with anything less than an expert!

• Yoga with Adriene - free yoga videos to do when exercise feels daunting. I love her attitude about yoga. Approachable movements for any body

• Change your diet! I have experimented with several diets and I am feeling best on a ketogenic diet - high fat, moderate protein, low carb.  Absolutely no sugar, guys! Not even fruit. Bread, grains, potatoes, root veggies all behave like sugar in the body. 

• Cold therapy. Dip in a natural cold water source or take daily cold showers - excellent for lymph and immune support. Hot / cold contrast showers are a good way to build up to 3-5 minutes of straight cold.

• Ground. Walk barefoot on grass. I learned recently that autoimmune symptoms improve by ten percent by simply connecting to the earth. 

• Learn about the dirty dozen and the clean fifteen. While organic food is always better for the environment, some conventionally grown foods are safe and much less expensive. 

• Affirmations - wake up everyday and tell yourself an affirmation that inspires you: “I am healing everyday.” “My body is healing.”

• Check out these financial assistance programs for Lyme patients. 

• Use GoodRX when your insurance won’t cover a prescription drug - or if it will only cover a ridiculously small portion. I have saved thousands with GoodRX.

• Educate your doctor about Lyme! Check out ILADS for physician training resources.

LESS THAN $50

• Curable app. $15/month. Designed for chronic pain suffers, Curable is a research-based app that guides its users with a Smart Coach through various exercises (mediation, visualization, brain training, writing exercises.) I’ve seen a big reduction in fear around pain and I sleep better after doing the Curable exercises..

• Epsom salt and baking soda baths for detox. Buy in bulk to save. Do it everyday, people! 4 cups of baking soda. 1 cup of epsom salt. Make it hot so you break a sweat. .

• Skin brushing. Another daily detox must. Moves the lymph, helps immune system. Learn about the correct way to skin brush here.

• Castor oil packs for detox. I fill a hot water bottle with very hot water, cover my liver (upper right ribs) in about 1tbs of castor oil, cover that spot with an old pillowcase and place hot water bottle on top until skin absorbs oil. Do it every night.

• Coffee enemas for detox. Use only green organic coffee. Instructions here. More info here.

• Mini trampoline for detox. Moves the lymph. Look on Craigslist, FB Marketplace for a used mini trampoline

• Wifi timer. After learning about the dangerous effects of electromagnetic fields for people trying to repair their immune systems (or really anyone!), Nate and I decided to turn our wifi off every night. When we enter into a parasympathetic response during sleep, our bodies are more vulnerable to the EMFs emitted by routers. When the unplugging-replugging system became tedious for us, we found a simple fix in plugging our router into a timer that shuts it off at 10pm and back on at 7am. Easy. Super important video on this subject from Dr. Klinghardt here.

• Cistus Tea. A core part of my anti-microbial protocol. I drink two cups everyday. Kills biofilm, the filmy barrier bubble that protects pathogens from the immune system. Dr. Klinghardt talks about the power of Cistus tea here. Easily one of the most potent and effective herbs I’ve ever taken. Add organic stevia to sweeten.

• Avoid toxins.  Only use products on your skin that have a high rating from the Environmental Working Group. You can look up any product on the market here. Shop at Bissoma! I trust my health with every product they sell.

AROUND $200ish

• Dynamic Neural Retraining System. I did this brain retraining program for nine months and believe it supported the healing that allowed me to feel awesome on my wedding day. It helped me disassociate from illness, break negative cycles of thinking and calm my nervous system. It’s a tool I will use the rest of my life, especially when gearing up for events, trips or plans that are out of my zone.

• Home sauna. I’ve used mine hundreds of times. Some say these cheaper saunas emit a lot of electromagnetic frequencies, but when I asked my Lyme specialist about that he said the detox benefits outweigh the EMF risks. You don’t need to stay in the sauna very long to sweat, only about ten minutes. If you want to get the best option on the market, look into Sunlight saunas.

• I’ve never tried it myself, but I hear great things about the Rawls protocol. Dr Rawls recovered from a debilitating case of Lyme and now has created an herbal protocol.

If you’d like to add to this list, please reach out to me! LindsayEWolff@gmail.com

I went on a “thisness” walk

We’ve been in the farm for two months now, two months of watching tiny things grow into tall stalky things, two months of looking out the window every night around 9:30 saying “I can’t believe it’s still light out!”

During these many weeks I’ve walked to the vegetable field hundreds of times, but I didn’t really arrive in this new place until I started making a habit of “thisness walks” as I walk the quarter mile path several times a day. Often stuck in my head or fidgeting with my phone or absorbed in a podcast, I have missed out on the glory of this place because of trivial distractions. So I take slow walks with the intention of simply paying attention.

I love the term “thisness” more than the concept of meditation because that, for me, implies more doing. I love it more than mindfulness because that term always felt too heady. I love it because…this is it! And all I want to do is get to a place where I can love what is right in front of me - both the tenderness of a squeaky piglet and the maddening ache of chronic pain. To look at reality with a gaze of love, as my teacher Richard Rohr would say.

I went back to take photos of some of the small and simple wonders I observed from a recent thinness walk. I’d walked past this road dozens of times never to revel in the eternal optimism of the blue sky, the silly curl of a pig tail, and the purity of the freshest air I’ve ever breathed. I felt I could be with myself - perhaps for the first time since arriving - as the buzz of my inner static softly faded. I leaned against a fence picking the dirt under my fingernails. I dangled long grasses in front of the snouts of eager pigs. I took a deep, refreshing drink from my water bottle. I daydreamed. It was ordinary and simple, and yet that gravel path is now a newborn world each time I walk it.

Why did it take so long for me to arrive here?

I am finding that living on a rural farm has a funny way of showing you yourself as you really are - how spiritual you thought you were, how connected to the earth you imagined yourself to be, how comfortable you really are with silence. Which is to say I’m finding I’m more resistant to the quiet than I'd like to be.

I wonder if it’s because I’m a little bit addicted to my phone? Or that I constantly know what time it is? Or that I often take a bath while scrolling Instagram instead of soaking up time to myself?

So, with more and more practice, I’m discovering that my most idea-friendly times come when I’m working in the field. When I can be quiet and dreamy. Working the land has become a fundamental rhythm of my creative life: I hula hoe, I feel inspired and then I run back to my journal.

Love and Chronic Illness

On a bitterly cold January morning in 2016, Nate and I went on one of our first dates. As we drove to the History Museum I remember feeling self-conscious, wondering if anything I was saying was coming off as strained or shaky. I felt horrible that day with bone-crushing fatigue, so delirious from illness that I can remember faking reading the museum placards, nodding like I was actually absorbing information on 1880s St. Louis architectural history, while inside I was a hive of nerves, achy, depleted and desperate to be back in bed. 

I’ve had health challenges for the entirety of our relationship and marriage. Nate and I never got to enjoy the spontaneity and thrills of a budding a relationship. Instead of staying out late getting drinks, we drank hot tea and wore sweatpants. I was so sure that the thing I wanted most - a loving partnership - would be compromised by my illness that I didn’t wait too long to test the waters with Nate. While we sipped beef stew at his kitchen table about a week into our relationship, I laid it all out while holding back tears: “I’m sick. They don’t know why. I’m exhausted all the time. I can hardly function.” He thought about it and said, “That’s okay. Everyone gets sick,” with so much warmth and understanding that I knew at once I was safe with him. He genuinely didn’t mind. 

When a dear friend texted me last week asking for guidance supporting her partner who is facing Graves disease, I instantly thought of about a hundred ways to help. Pain and fatigue have often felt like third parties in our relationship, but after many years of trial and error Nate and I have found a way to gracefully work with the realities of my health condition and still enjoy a happy life together. And as I continue to heal, it becomes more clear that the illness help us build a solid foundation of trust and patience, and I doubt we’d share the intimacy and friendship we do now without it. The very worst thing is becoming the very best thing.

I pondered my friend’s question and asked Nate if I could interview him on what it’s like to be a caretaker and partner to someone with a chronic, complex illness. And then I felt a bit insecure. What if there is resentment? What if he feels our life is less complete than he’d imagined? What if I’ve let him down? “Okay, tell me what this has been like for you,” I said, bracing for painful answers…

Which were actually very sweet and very straightforward - just like Nate. Here are some of the things we explored about living well with a precarious health condition. I hope they are a support to people caring for someone treating a chronic illness.

• “Everything is subject to change. Every plan you make is open ended.” We have bought tickets to see one of our favorite bands THREE times, and each time I was too sick to go. Another friend always went along with Nate while I stayed home, usually weeping on the couch while they headed out the door. Which reminds me. Even though it’s maddening to miss out on plans, I found we both had a better time if I could still root Nate on to enjoy his night and I could find a way to self-soothe. Call a friend. Watch a movie. Take a bath. Be over the top loving of yourself.

• Nate emphasized that it was important to him to go out and do the things that bring him joy, even when I can’t participate. He loves to see live music, play ultimate frisbee and go to music festivals and I wasn’t up for those activities during the first year of our relationship. Or I went along and made us both miserable! It has to be safe for him to enjoy what he loves and not be afraid to claim his own time and space. And it’s on me to create conditions that make him feel nice and supported as he’s packing his bags to go to a music festival while I stay home. That has been the biggest growing edge for me, honestly. 

• During more severe flare ups, it was always part of my personality to want to do more: call more specialists, take more herbs, do more detox work, freak out more. But Nate was continually reminding me of a perennial truth about healing: less is usually best. That NOT doing anything, that actually chilling out and getting my body in a relaxed, parasympathetic state was not only the way out of intense swells of pain and infection, and it was also a smart strategy for our relationship. And so we learned the art of doing nothing. We’d lay on the floor with blankets, watch endless episodes of Outlander, and eat off a big pot of curry all day until my stamina returned. This was the best medicine for me and, looking back, some of our sweetest time together.

• Speaking of flare ups. There are times in any autoimmune or Lyme condition when shit hits the fan. My friend asking for support was in the throes of her partner’s flare up, and my first word of advice was to start preparing for the next one. Freeze meals ahead of time that to avoid having to cook. Be okay with the house being a mess for a week. Know that it may be physically impossible for your partner to sweep the floor or carry a laundry basket. Remind yourself that none of this is anyone’s fault and that we are all living in bodies vulnerable to illness at any time. Save money for flare ups and times when your partner may not be able to work. Give massages. Sit outside together. Share gratitude for each other. Being debilitatingly sick and dependent on someone else is a supremely vulnerable state to be in, and we will all be there someday. I found that when Nate would give me lots of sincere verbal reassurances (“You’re safe. You have everything you need. All you need to do is rest. You are getting stronger.”), I would heal faster because I could relax more. Words of affirmation are my love language!

• Have a Dirk. That’s Nate’s best friend, who I jokingly called our understudy yesterday - he knows the role and is ready at any moment to shine when the lead actor breaks his leg. Or has a sinus infection, in my case. Dirk has been a phenomenal support to our marriage because of his fun, bouncy energy and also his readiness to be Nate’s wingman when I am out of commission. I think Dirk has been on just as many dates with Nate at this point as I have! Having a friend who is understanding and supportive of the illness dynamic is like gold. In my coaching work, I always encourage my clients to set up a “healing roundtable,” a set of friends and practitioners who they can share openly with and ask for support when they are in the trenches. Caretakers, in the same way, seek an ally who you can lean on so you too can have the release valve without having to explain the situation every time. 

• One last thing. We find specific words of gratitude can be a powerful antidote to resentment. It feels so good to know your acts of service are being noticed and appreciated. “Thank you for taking the trash out in the cold. Thank you for making curry without fish sauce because you know I hate that. Thank you for turning down the music while I take a nap. Thank you for buying me my favorite IPA.”

Farmers Market People

When we can get the chance to get off the farm, we run with it. After almost two months living outside of Seattle, we had yet to enter into the city. Dusty, tried and daunted by the two hour round trip drive in traffic, we usually look at each other with relief as we agree that, okay, we will go to Seattle… next week. 

Yesterday, we made it happen. As we exited the highway, we were stunned by massive scale of the buildings, the tented kingdoms of homeless people, the fancy business people, the quaint outdoor cafes packed with people in sunglasses. I think I was more captivated than Nate, rolling down my window, surfing my hand through the air, crying “I love the city!” 

But after navigating a labyrinthine underground parking lot and walking circles insides a swarm of construction zones, long lines, and blasting air conditioning, we drove home a few hours wondering if we are truly becoming country folk. “I never want to leave the farm again,” I panted. 

Plus, we were under a trance. We’d watched a totally gorgeous and inspiring story about a couple who transformed a dead 200 acre California farm into a lush biodynamic, give-you-goosebumps-with-its-beauty paradise. (Go see “Biggest Little Farm”!)

Maybe we are country people for now, but we are finding our way to connect with civilization here as we sell at the farmers market twice a week, on Thursdays at the charming Snohomish mountain town market, and on Sundays at the Everett market which overlooks the marina. 

With plenty of time to people watch at the Everett market this weekend, Nate and I sat together on a cooler for hours greeting marketgoers from behind our table piled high with bacon, pork chops and speckled brown eggs displayed on a bright blue tablecloth. 

Among our farmers market friends…

There was the dad with the “road trip please” t-shirt.

There was the tiny girl with the pink hair who told me “I like your hair” and I said “I like YOUR hair!”

There was the woman with the huge scrawling tattoo on her forearm: family.

There was the guy with the black eye limping around on crutches with casts on his leg and his arm - not drawing any attention to himself at all. 

There was the lady trying to sell rice crispy treats before they melted in the sun.

There was the vendor next to us wooing customers: “Only four ingredients. Try a sample!”

There was the Weed Cream Guy booth waving his giant sign: “Re-Leaf”

There was the lady who asked a million questions about our bacon, wanted to see it, touch it, hold it, squeeze - and then said, “thank you” and walked away.

There I was, gaga over the dogs, asking Nate if we could get a puppy over and over again. 

I love the farmers market for its weirdos and hippies and moms and health food freaks but I mostly love it because most everyone there seems to be…a little more at ease? A little less obsessed with their phones? I want to believe the market brings out the vacation mode in all of us, and working our booth each week is a front row seat to an amusing carousel of people who are there for the carrots and the turnips, but also for the chance move a little bit more slowly.

The more time I spend learning the trade of farming, I’m coming to what a noble and worthy thing it is to grow food for people. Before we moved here many people mentioned how Seattle was much more progressive in terms of food access and organic farming practices, but Nate and I - more acutely homesick this week - are even more filled with love for the St. Louis farming scene as we feel the lack of OUR people at each market we attend. We are making friends slowly, but often wake up with sore hearts on Saturday mornings wishing we were at the Tower Grove Farmers Market buying greens and eggs from the farmers we love most. 

For the joy of it

I came up against my first real can’t-get-out of bed health challenge since we moved to Washington, what I like to call “normal person sick”: sore throat, aches, coughing like a lifelong smoker. And you want to know what was stressing me out, piling my suffering on top of suffering? Missing my writing goal for the week!

As I scrambled for content while nursing a heating pad on my raw chest, I had a bit of a realization. Oh! This project is actually about receiving creativity - not beating the life out of it! This is about freedom and pleasure and reveling in my gifts. Not about posting four times a week. Sometimes I can be so dutiful and annoyingly task oriented that I miss out on the spirit of the goal I’ve set. 

“Do your writing in joy and gratitude!!!!” my dear friend and writing mentor Mark Chmiel texted me after I posted about my Summer of Gifts goals, already knowing this lesson for me.

And I was like: “yeah, yeah, I know, I know.”

Hours later I sat with Nate outside in the late afternoon under this gorgeous blooming rhododendron tree just outside our house. I thought about how its beauty comes from it just being itself - a tree that shares its crazy beautiful gifts with us for just a few weeks in late spring, and then rests for the remainder of the year. It doesn’t try so hard to be so stunning. It just is. 

Then I took a bath instead of doing my writing practice. For the pure pleasure of it. 

Creativity has been a concept I’ve wrestled a lot with during my illness because I didn’t feel I had the life force to be imaginative when I was in the trenches. Writing is always the first thing to go when I feel shitty, and the first thing to come back when I’m back to feeling well.

But this practice of regular shared writing is nudging me to see that great art always blooms with a certain effortlessness, not necessarily under high pressure deadlines. Maybe inspiration is just hovering around us all the time, easily accessed yet content to move on to the next person willing to put a great idea into form. Maybe our day itself is the content, and the discipline lines in merely paying attention to what wants to be shared and sharing it. Maybe it’s that easy.

Eating Animals

Last week, while I was gently tucking cabbage plants into the field, I heard a gunshot. I knew at once that somewhere nearby an animal had just dropped to its death. Without notice, a family had arrived at the farm seeking beef for their church’s weekend festival. They needed to feed 200 people- tomorrow. So out came the shotgun. The entire slaughter happened while I was a half-mile away, but I felt an eerie shift in my body at the sound of the bullet. 

The death was quick. “Happened it a split second,” Nate explained when I ran up to the back of the yard where her body splayed on the grass. Everyone said the other cows didn’t flinch when it happened, but as they moaned and tossed in their pasture, I doubted that. I realized that the real pain of the slaughter was not felt by the fallen cow as much by her kin who scowled at us with what I intuited as bovine rage. 

I loved that cow. I’d look into her deep, dark, watery eyes while I slid the hose through the fence and she’d look back at me with the dreamy gaze of a newborn baby.  

The other farmers here wouldn’t see it this way, of course. As the one of the most sensitive souls on the farm, I am keenly aware of the daily cycle of life and death here. Even in the vegetable field we are squashing slugs, tossing slugs into hawk-hunted fields, and ripping weeds out of the earth as if it were good therapy. Death is part of the life of any farm.

As someone who eats meat, I am giving a lot of thought to the space between the gunshot and the feast our new friends will enjoy this weekend. The slaughter of animals is something I’d always agreed every carnivore should witness, but as I watched them butcher my cow friend from the kitchen window, shit got real. 

I’ve seen many dead animals during our first month on the farm, and each time it feels like the split-second moment of death saps the dewy-eyed soul from the animals and all that’s left is their cooling body on the grass. Matter and spirit are seemingly no longer one. More than the blood and the bullets, it’s this startling transformation that spooks me the most. 

Witnessing regular animal slaughters is informing my instincts about what it means to be a person who eats meat. I was a vegetarian for years and my health suffered even more. It seems my body thrives best on a carnivorous diet after years of experimentation and trial and error. So, instead of making drastic changes to my diet, instead of being reactive, I am paying close attention to how living on a livestock farm is changing my relationship with animals, those living, those freshly slaughtered in my backyard and those served on a plate with a pickle.

Here’s the best I can come up with for now: I make sure to give thanks every time I bite into a piece of meat, honoring the spirit of the animal which I believe is still alive, just morphed into a different form. I think of how that sweet cow will be present at the church picnic, offering those feasting nourishment in the form of -I have to say it - some delicious burgers.

I reflect on all of this with curiosity and openness to changing my stance on being a meat eater. I am open to anything. Until then, I’ll maintain my practice of only purchasing and eating ethical meat, and making sure as the resident Highly Sensitive Farmer that all our animals live an abundant, happy life…and only one bad day.

Finding a way to yes

We have welcomed a new farmer from Tokyo for a two week stay. A 23 year old “wwoofer” or volunteer farmer, Mio is in her final year of graduate school to become a veterinarian. A pig vet at that! When she was planning her trip months ago, she Googled “agriculture in the United States” and soon found herself waking up at five every morning to milk cows on a dairy farm in Wisconsin and pulling weeds on a cattle farm in Houston the following week. 

Not that the farm work here is anymore glamorous. But we’ve made it our task to take Mio under our red, white, and blue wings and show her the best parts of American culture and a place we’re still getting to know ourselves. Two days ago, as Nate, Mio and I sat on salvaged patio furniture in the yard and picked at roasted farm duck, Mio asked one of her first personal questions since arriving: “Are most Americans…like you? Working many jobs instead of one career? Like, figuring it out?” We laughed, explaining that, yes, to some degree many young Americans have a less direct career path and that it’s a cultural norm for people to try out many vocations in their lifetime. Mio will have her doctorate at 24, and it’s clear that she grew up in a culture that values hard work, loyalty, and pursing security as early in life as possible. There’s not a lot of space for “figuring it out” or “finding your dream job” in Japanese culture. “I will be a veterinarian all my life,” she told us with a note of pride. 

It’s with this kind of focus that Mio shows up on the farm as our most dutiful and eager worker. We joke that we could ask her any old question and she’ll always answer yes - sometimes even before we can finish asking it!

“Can you be ready to go to the movies in ten minutes even though you’re covered in pig poop?”

“Want to smoke pot for the very first time in your life?”

“Would you help us castrate those piglets?“

“Could you hold this flapping chicken while I go pee in the woods?”

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

Mio’s yes-ness has inspired me. She has me thinking about how for so many years I’ve had to live with a stance of “no,” protecting myself from what may cause harm to my unwell body. Now I see that saying no has been perfectly appropriate while I’ve been recovering. My body has needed predictability, safety and daily naps because it’s been fighting a major infection for almost a decade. The boundaries that come with “no” were necessary for my survival. (I wish I could have seen it that way at the time- I would have saved myself so much anguish!) 

But now that I am healing - like, healing for real - I’m soaking in what it feels like to enter back into the land of the living, into the wonderful space of yes, where healthy people commit to plans to go hiking without worrying how much pain it will inflict, where vacations are not spent in bed, where life feels as freeing as wearing shorts and flip flops on the first warm day of spring. 

While I am overjoyed to be entering a new phase of “yes” I know there will be more “no” seasons ahead for me, and I am more prepared for those now. I’ve heard myself say many times that I missed out on my twenties and the experiences I imagined people have post-college (building a career, starting a family, and traveling) while I was on my parents couch every weekend about as miserable as can be. 

But all those years of “no” are somehow becoming integrated into something more life-affirming than just “missing out” or “being behind.” I have learned there is an abysmal gap between an attitude of “yes” and “no” when you’re in the throes of a seriously hard life event. I’m still in awe of the Lyme patients I know who can tell me the disease is the best thing that ever happened to them. They are usually the people who have become even more generous and compassionate because of their illness and found a way to make it mean something more than being forced to sit on the sidelines while life passes by. I am still somewhere in between on the spectrum of “yes” and “no” as my healing is unfolding every week. But I will say, after not being able to push a lawnmower five feet a few summers ago, I mowed a field for an hour this morning, grinning like an idiot over the power and capability of my body, looking on at my completed work with a joyful “Hell yes!"

I'm doing a new thing

This is the first post in a new writing series I’m starting. I will post four posts a week for four weeks. Starting today. Hi! The theme: Summer of Gifts.

The name comes from a new idea I’m playing with from the author Jen Sincero, who says that we can shake up the ego (what she calls the Big Snooze) when we get over our petty smallness and begin to share our gifts with the world with heart and integrity and courage. She’s helping me realize that I am not living out my full blissed-out potential because I’m not freely offering my gifts to the world - my way with words, my power of woo, my love of bringing people together, my Lindsayness.

And when my not using my gifts, I tend to wake up in the morning and look around at my life - my sweet husband, the glorious organic farm where we live, the stunning Cascade mountains outside of our window - and still feel a leaden tug at my heart. I’m tired of being of writer who doesn’t write, a person with ideas and things to say who doesn’t say them, and someone with a crazy story about recovering from a catastrophic illness who doesn’t share it. I have worked WAY too hard to be well in all areas of my life to live with this nonsense!

Nine years ago this week I was in a fetal position in my parent’s basement, sure I would die. Nine years ago began the saga of what seven years after that I’d learn was late stage Lyme. Everything about how far I’ve come and the life I am living now is a gift with a capital G - the wonderful man I married, the world renowned health care I’m receiving, the miracle of moving to the Pacific Northwest simply so I can heal. It all feels like an abundance I don’t deserve - AND - I’m choosing a new way of relating to the Gifts: I receive them, I enjoy them, and I give thanks for them! And I want to share them with you.

I have Lyme to thank how its burned away anything trivial, trite and not-real from my life. All chronic diseases have a no-frills way of helping us see the energetic charge of everything we say, buy, do and think. Energy is like gold, and so when something is weighing me down energetically, my radar goes up. As I continue to heal from Lyme, I know now that the discipline of a daily writing practice is the next heaping dose of medicine I need to swallow, even if my Big Snooze suffers a huge vulnerability hangover every time I share. I just don’t have the energy anymore to carry all the creative deadweight that comes when I don’t go for the thing I know I should be going for.

Some guidelines I have for the Summer of Gifts:

a) work no more than an hour on each post as a practice of letting go of perfectionism - the chief form of resistance that keeps me from being a creative person. It’s okay that my writing won’t be polished, perfect or poised. It may be pathetic!! The point is just to show up and write!

b) to let everything about this project be really, really fun!

More tomorrow, and the next day…

xo

The promise of tipping points

'What wound did ever heal but by degrees?' Shakespeare 

Seventeen months since my last post?! Yep. A lot has happened during my long hiatus: I’ve done a lot of healing work, I got married(!), and Nate and I are about to make a big move to Seattle to work on an organic farm and be closer to my Lyme specialist.

I’ve recently become a student of medical qigong, one of the most therapeutic and powerful modalities I have come across in a long time. I’ve been practicing yoga for over ten years, and I am grateful to my practice for keeping me connected to my body through the course of my illness. But, I’ve gotta say, yoga has lost its luster for me as I find myself going through the motions.

Qigong is where its at!

I’ve read that there are hundreds of words in Chinese used to describe “qi” or “chi,” but in English only two come close to expressing its meaning: energy and breath. “Gong” means work. In qigong, we skillfully cultivate our life force, our chi, in order to release blockages in the body, things like childhood trauma, a poor diet, burnout, injuries, and chronic diseases.

And, if you’ve seen people in a park on a Saturday morning wearing flowy clothes who look like they are tossing a big basketball of invisible, mystical energy back and forth, you know it’s a very beautiful and sacred and sometimes bizarre practice.

My friend Sheila, who is training to become a medical qigong instructor, called me a few weeks ago when I was in the throes of a terrible case of the flu. It was one of those can’t-get-off-the-bathroom floor sicknesses, and it reminded me a lot of the initial decline of my health, which, of course, made me crazy anxious. Holding the phone tightly to my ear, I listened as Sheila told me about a powerful concept in healing called “tipping points.”

She shared that the process of healing is a lot like a technique in chemistry known as titration. One solution is added to a beaker of an unknown solution, drop by drop, and the beaker remains clear with no apparent reaction. But, as soon as, say, the twenty-first drop is added, the solution turns bright purple, indicating to the chemist the concentration of the solution. This phenomenon is known as the tipping point.

In health and in disease, the tipping point, or any moment of spontaneous change, can come as a total surprise. When my health collapsed in 2010, my body had reached a dangerous tipping point even though I felt perfectly healthy and was having the time of my life living in Nashville. I’d made a custom of sipping lemoncellos on my front porch after work with my roommate, I twirled to my heart’s delight at honky tonks on the weekends, and I enjoyed sweaty trail runs most evenings. I was happy, and I thought I was healthy. But I hadn’t considered the “drops” tipping me toward a health crisis: a college heartbreak, exposure to tick bites working as a backpacking guide, working like a dog to finish my thesis, a move to a new city, the onset of chronic eye issues, the removal of all my metal fillings, and, the straw that broke the camel’s back, living in a moldy house. All of these factors primed my body for a weakened immune system and the surfacing of the Epstein Barr virus as well as Lyme disease. I didn’t see it coming at all, but in retrospect the pattern is crystal clear.

“I’ve seen many positive tipping points happen for you this year," Sheila reassured me on the phone. “More are coming. Healing is happening.”

Each time I go to the acupuncturist, eat greens, take my supplements, meditate and prioritize my health, I am adding potent drops into my brew of health and vitality, even when I don’t feel the immediate results, even when process feels like an endless slog, even when the water doesn’t change color. Healing can be an invisible and mysterious process, until one day you just get out of bed with a springtime pop of energy and everything feels lighter.

The promise of tipping points helped me endure the flu. It helped me have patience with my immune system, recommit myself to my daily detox practices, and, frankly, just buck up a bit. Health is coming. Have faith. It’s okay to watch TV for a week straight while you let your body go to work.

What I love about qigong is the symbolism of each posture, and how when we hold a physical stance we are also organizing ourselves into a new state of consciousness. Postures of fear and anxiety may take the shape of the fetal position, which is how I held myself through most of February when I was so sick. But when I began to practice more powerful, life-affirming positions like the “Tree Hug” pose (wide stance, core strong, arms open as if trapped around a trunk) for even three minutes, I felt more of a “yes” toward life, even as the headaches and fatigue raged on. These simple poses are helping me to “act out” attitudes of courage and trust and, with daily practice, are transforming me someone who more naturally embodies those qualities when my body is under stress.

I find one of the most empowering parts about the tipping point theory is that our body has no choice but to heal with every loving drop we offer it. When we do the daily work, we can only slope upward in the right direction. Healing is happening.

If you want to try a short and peaceful qigong practice, I have been loving this video online featuring a woman who shows you how wise and amazing you will become if you practice qigong everyday!

Enjoy and let me know how the practice goes!

Allowing Love

I'm wrapped up in a blanket. I’m drinking tea in the grassy slope in my parents backyard. Its 11am on a Thursday, the third Thursday in a row that I've been ripped apart with a Lyme disease flare up. I think I might explode with grief, so I run upstairs and type an email to Ann, a dear friend in Wisconsin who for over twenty years has suffered the loss of her husband’s health after he fell from a ladder.

I write:

My biggest anxiety is about Nathan. I worry how disappointing everything is. We are canceling the Kansas City trip for Christine’s wedding. Everything is a struggle: I drove home from camping on Wesley’s land at 2am because my hip hurt, we can’t bike because my hip and feet hurt, we don’t go to shows because they are too loud for me.

I tear up thinking, thinking, thinking about what my bad health means for us. Making plans feels impossible. Even Saturday night plans. I worry how much this will take from us. There will be no farm, no babies, no traveling to New Mexico, no joy. 

I feel better after I send the email. I take a nap and head home.

When I open the door, Nathan is chopping onions at the kitchen counter. He’s worked a long day at the farm, and his skin has broken out in hives from an allergy. I rub his back and put on the kettle.

For most of the years I've been sick, I’ve burdened myself with premeditated anxieties about how might bad health would totally destroy all chances at finding a lifelong partner. And I honestly think a lot of those worries manifested in a lot of clumsy, guarded relationships in which I spent more time evaluating if I thought the person could handle me, than just allowing them to love me. It turns out this a a very exhausting way to open your heart up to someone again and again, and it didn't really give anyone a fair shot at trying it out with someone with a complex chronic illness. 

Just before Nathan and I started spending time together, I was at a coffee shop with a friend telling her about my serial dating disasters. I was really burned out. She listened, and by the end of our time together I made a commitment to myself: I'll be single the rest of my life if it means never, ever compromising or apologizing for who I am. Illness included. All of it. I'm going to let someone love me in all my imperfections. 

Nathan puts down the knife to wrap his arms around me. He smells like cumin and soap. I love that no matter how matter how many groaning texts I've sent him that day, he greets me with the same loving, smiley welcome.  Every time he's showing me that it's me walking through the door, it's me who makes his eyes crinkle up with joy, it's me inside this weary, broken body. And it turns out that me is pretty great. 

We eat dinner, fold laundry, and a response from Ann pops up on my phone:

My first reaction? Let Nathan love you.  I'm sure there were times when Dave wished he weren't affecting me so. But would I have wanted to be away from him, not by his side? NO.  The only place I ever wanted to be was near him- sick or not, limited or not.  Dave always gave me space to do the things that were important to me (think Africa, working, etc...) but truthfully, I was always happier being where he was rather than away from him. 

When I read her response, I notice Nathan's leg is draped over mine as we sort the t-shirts. It's this kind of unnecessarily close way we are always folding ourselves over each other that tell me, yes, Ann is right. All we want is to be side by side. We are impossibly happy despite terrible circumstances.  Is the illness to thank for our bond? It hardly feels like a fair trade. But I know that I couldn't have let anyone in on my life had I not made myself the promise at that coffee shop years ago, to be loved exactly as I am.

What is health coaching, you say?

Recently, I was at doctor's office and got to chatting with a woman in the waiting room. On the way out, we both got into the elevator and she asked me what I do for a living. Queue the elevator speech!

I quickly told her about how I'd seen over 32 doctors before I was diagnosed with Lyme disease. I said that I believe there is a big, gushing hole in the healthcare system: consistent and relational support for sick people!  And I explained that I became a coach to help people strategize how to live with more ease and joy through chronic illness. The doors opened, I handed her my card, and we parted ways.

Whew! 

This 30 second interaction got me excited to share more about what I do as a coach and what kind of awesome transformations are happening in the lives of my clients.

And, I've got to say, my health has significantly improved since working with my own coach because now I have a plan for my healing, I know what I want, and I'm way less hard on myself.

Here's a picture of what I do: 

I love to work with people who are:

• ready to make a big life change for the sake of their health and need the support to get there
• feeling overwhelmed managing chronic conditions like Lyme disease, fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue and other autoimmune issues.. or don't yet have a diagnosis
• wanting clarity about what food choices are best for their body, lifestyle and health needs
• fried, frazzled, freaked out and need a new strategy for living with ease

I have supported people with:

• listening to their inner wisdom for guidance in decision making (yes, you can fire your doctor!)
• finding work that supports their self care 
• developing practices to nourish the body and spirit through "flare ups" or herxing
• droping the shame around grief and sadness over being sick 
• investigating the impulse to "be positive" by looking at the deeper story
• embracing the beautiful and meaningful lessons illness has come to teach

I  do this by offering people:

• consistent attention and support with sessions and check-ins four times a month
• pertinent and to-the-point questions to get clear about where they're getting in their own way
• a lens to see new awesome possibilities for their life 
• whole-hearted empathy and compassion - I have lived it!

I also offer sliding scale payment options - cost should never prohibit anyone from receiving coaching! 

Want to talk more about where you'd love to be with your health? Set up a free, 50 minute strategy session by emailing me: Lindsay@LindsaySihilling.com. 

Life on the Edge of Things

 Lately, I've been listening to a song on repeat -  Mipso's "Coming Down the Mountain."

In the song, (written post election!) the speaker's overwhelm urges her to pack up her stuff, leave her community behind and head off into the mountains alone. There, she surrounds herself with beauty: waters for fishing, fields of rhododendrons, and solitude. 

Listening to this song over and over, it occurred to me that I'm stuck on the invitation at the core of her story. It's more than the slow and folksy melody that makes me daydream about moving to the mountains. It's the deep, pit-of-my-stomach, irresistible resonance I feel when I listen: Yes, please. I need that. I long to check out - I long for a break from my pain, my sleepless nights and my hurting body.

Mountains, leaving, retreat and change are all on my mind, of course, because I've just returned from vacation in Asheville, a magical mountain town in the Appalachians. Our time in Asheville felt like a long, much needed exhale, and it stirred up some new things in me.

I love traveling because of how it offers a unique bird's eye view on life back home. In Asheville, I could see clearly how I'm living in liminal space, straddling the world of the healthy and the kingdom of the sick. One evening we drove out to the majestic New Belgium Brewery, which is like a DisneyLand for beer people. (I don't drink, but my sweetheart is beer fanatic, so I try to be a good sport.) Sitting there on the patio, I felt especially on the edge of things, feeling worlds apart from my happy and tipsy bar fellows. I felt the tension of looking healthy, yet feeling consumed with fatigue. Belonging but also so very separate. 

Liminal space (from the Latin limen for "threshold") is the territory between who stages, rooms or experiences. One might experience liminal space during big life transitions: the birth of a child, a new job, and, of course, during illness. These experiences shake us up from our cultural sleepwalking, which is why most people who are chronically ill or face ongoing adversity tend to be ultimately more wise, tender and awake than most - if they can accept life's invitation to grow and change. All great transformation happens in liminal space.

I have read that some native peoples call liminal space "crazy time." It's the space between the destruction of an old way, and the invitation to enter a genuinely new and creative thing. Inevitably, liminal space hurts. It's always uncomfortable, and there's always an push to hurry back to normalcy once the dust has settled.

But for a lot of people with ongoing health challenges, the dust never settles. Some are stuck betwixt and between for years and years, and one's quality of life depends on how she relates to her "crazy time."

Last November, I met a wonderful woman at a conference in Cincinatti. Wendy was also living in liminal space - her daughter was really, really sick - and we were energetically attracted to each other with a magnetic force. We ate almost all of our meals together. 

"You know," Wendy told me, "people spend lots of money and travel to India to get what you have." After living in an ashram for seven years, she knows a thing or two about the spiritual life.

"Look at you," she said. "Everything about you is real. You are wise beyond your years. I know it hurts so much live here, but you are wide awake to life."

Just like that, she shifted my "crazy time" into sacred time.

When I listened to "Coming Down the Mountain"  this morning for the hundredth time, I loved it for being a song about leaving, but also a song about coming back. With each listen, I accept that no mountain town or wildflower field will ever take me as deep as the of experience living in this body, in this moment, with this grace. 

Peace to all those who hurt, ache and long to leave. May you fall in love with your life on the edge of things.

xo 

Why Everyone With a Health Challenge Needs a Contemplative Practice

© The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society
Concept & design by Maia Duerr; illustration by Carrie Bergman

Last Wednesday, I woke to a deep, dull pain all over my body. Something like flu symptoms, the aches throbbed, pulsed and hurt to the touch.  I've been through this charade many times, and I've noticed that my brain immediately flipped into stress response. Within seconds of waking up and registering the pain, I panicked:

This can't be happening. I am going to have to be in bed today. I should ask for an extension on my deadline. I should cancel our dinner plans. I'm going to have to explain this to my clients. I'm going to be out of money this month.  

Then I sat up in bed. I took some deep breaths and was able to observe the script speeding through my head. I was able to lovingly talk back: 

Okay, slow down. All you have to do is breathe and get some hot tea. One thing at a time. Just notice where your body is holding tension. Just let it do what it wants. You're okay.

I got up, put on the kettle, took a hot shower, rested for a few hours and was able to work the second half of the day. I even got to a yoga class. The pain was there, but I worked with it - not against it.  I actually was okay. 

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Tenderness like that has taken me a long time to cultivate.

Anyone with chronic illness knows how easy it is to throw your body under the bus when it wakes you up in pain. Anytime I find myself spinning in that chaos, I try to stop to remind myself that my body is always doing its best, and I should probably give it a break. 

I've kept to a contemplative practice for years because of how it's transformed my relationship with my body. When you're living with chronic illness, your brain can begin to brew a lot of negativity and fear. Somewhere down the line it's easy to split off from your truest, loveliest self and only follow the voices of self-hatred, anxiety and fear that health will never, ever return.

Meditation helps. My contemplative practice looks a bit like this:

Some mornings, I get up extra early to spend time at a beautiful pond in a nearby park. I sit in my "scared spot" - a worn wooden bench - and simply appreciate the amazing landscaping.

Sometimes I sit on my cushion, set a timer for 20 minutes, and close my eyes. Mostly I'm just trying get to a place of "yes" - that feeling that, yes, I can accept this too.

Instead of scrolling the internet when I have 15 minutes before I have to leave, I'll turn off the lights and just sit on the couch in silence. 

Contemplation is more about being than doing. 

Deep belly breaths. Phone off. Talking to my tired body: "I completely love and accept you. Thanks for all you do for me. You are amazing."

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No one can talk about contemplation better than Fr. Richard Rohr, so I've included some of his masterful reflections on the subject here: 

"...We have to calmly observe our own stream of consciousness and see its compulsive patterns. That's what happens in the early stages of contemplation, which does not yet feel like prayer. We wait in silence. In silence all our usual patterns assault us. Our patterns of control, addiction, negativity, tension, anger, and fear assert themselves. 

Most teachers insist on at least twenty minutes for a full contemplative 'sit,' because you can assume that the first half (or more) of any contemplative prayer time is just letting go of those thoughts, judgments, fears, negations, and emotions that want to impose themselves on you. You have to become the watcher, where you step back from those things and observe them without judgment. You separate from them and you watch them 'over there' until you realize that feeling is not me. I'm over here watching that over there, which means it isn't me.

Thomas Keating teaches a beautifully simple exercise to use in contemplation. Imagine yourself sitting on the bank of a river. Observe each of your thoughts coming along as if they're saying, 'Think me, think me.' Watch your feelings come by saying, 'Feel me, feel me.' Acknowledge that you're having the feeling; acknowledge that you're having the thought. Don't hate it, don't judge it, don't critique it, don't, in any way, move against it. Simply name it: 'resentment toward so and so,' 'a thought about such and such.' Admit that you're having it, then place it on a boat and let it go down the river. The river is your stream of consciousness.

In the early stages of beginning a contemplative practice (and for the first few minutes of each new contemplative experience), you're simply observing your repetitive thoughts. The small, ego self can't do this because it's rather totally identified with its own thoughts and illusions, which are all the ego has. In fact, the ego is a passing game. That's why it's called the false self. It's finally not real. Most people live out of their false self, so 'they think they are their thinking.' They don't have a clue who they are apart from their thoughts. What you are doing in contemplation is moving to a level beneath your thoughts: the level of pure and naked being. This is the level of pure consciousness. This is not consciousness of anything in particular; it's simply naked awareness."

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I'd love to talk more with you about developing your own contemplative practice. The tree above is a wonderful inspiration that has expanded my appreciation of spiritual practice beyond seated prayer and meditation. Contemplation is anytime we are in the flow of compassionate noticing!

Which practice calls out to you?

What's holding you back from regular contemplative practices?

What mental scripts would you love to be free of? 

Advocating for Lyme Disease

I'm on a mission to spread the word about Lyme. Last week, I published this article in St. Louis Magazine on the threats of tick-borne illnesses to folks in my hometown of St. Louis. I hope you'll read it for your own preventative healthcare!

Although I likely contracted Lyme while hiking in Colorado or Nashville, I've connected with dozens of Lyme patients in St. Louis who have struggled to receive the appropriate medical care because of inaccurate testing, a lack of a diagnosis (took me seven years), and a politically-charged medical system that refuses to acknowledge and treat Lyme in its chronic stages. 

I've fallen in love with so many Lyme patients, and got to speak with even more as I interviewed people for this story. Lymies are unsung heroes. They not only have to endure grueling physical, mental and emotional hardship, but often also have to be their own advocates, healers, mentors and guides through a journey in which support is regularly denied. 

An excellent breakdown of the Lyme controversy can be read here.

Great advice here for what to do if you're bitten by a tick. 

Please protect yourself, dear ones. I love you and I want you to be well!

SOURCE: ILADS