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!
