UPDATE September 2017: Coconut isn’t for everyone and, blood tests recently confirmed, it isn’t for me…it turns out I have an intolerance and I no longer consume it at all. This proved to be interesting twist since Ayurveda has since taught me that coconut is “too cooling” for my vata constitution to cope with; whilst oily foods are essential to me, I need warming oils such as sesame whilst olive oil is also a great vata-pacifyer. So where does that leave me with electrolytes? I continue to find benefit from added salt in my diet (again, this is consistent with a vata-pacifying diet), especially at times when I am being affected by the “pitta provoking” factor of EMFs in my environment (see my post Building Coherent Structures for more on that). A little Himalayan salt in my porridge for breakfast is a great start to my day and, at times, I drink sole for the sheer mineral uplift. The material in this post still feels relevant enough to share, in spite of my own particular foibles…
To anyone who has been brain-storming fibromylagia or chronic fatigue for some time, this feels important. Assuming you have already got to where you are no longer looking at this as a strictly mechanical or emotional thing (these play their part but they’re seldom ‘it’) then, if you haven’t already, try on for size – as I have been for the last couple of years – that this is a response to your electro-magnetic environment. And then take it further to look at how this isn’t, as such, a “faulty” response that your body is having but a sign that its ambitions aren’t being met by current circumstance; it is striving to respond, in a highly evolved way, to its broadest environment in a way that isn’t…yet…being supported by the organic reality made available to it. Perhaps something it needs in order to communicate with the energetic field (with which we are all inherently connected) is in short supply, but what?
That electro-magnetic environment – no getting around it – consists of at least two levels of activity; the man-made and the “cosmic” so, if you haven’t already, perhaps its time to start keeping an eye on the space weather and other EMF variables that your body is, likely, responding to in order to notice any patterns of behaviour that your body displays in relationship to them. Perhaps that learning curve is what your so-called illness is all about.
As (anyone reading my blog knows already) I have been doing for some time! Which is why I’ve been aware all week that both an incoming CME and a significant geomagnetic storm are expected at any time, with geomagnetic charts shown going high into the oranges and reds on the forecast. My familiarity with how these events affect my body is why I knew, after a week of forecasting this, that the predicted GM event had finally arrived in the middle of last night; and I don’t need to check the websites to confirm that or how behind the news they sometimes are with announcing what I feel.
I knew because, in the night, without even waking up properly, I was forced to trot off to the bathroom multiple times to go for a “wee”; not just any old wee but what felt like pints and pints of it – where did all this liquid come from? And because, when I woke this morning I knew that I was having a physical response the likes of which I hadn’t had since last time we had such an event. One that, for me, consists of an all-consuming pain like I hurt deeply, in micro-layers right down to the very nucleus of every cell and am suddenly capable of feeling everything that the brain normally considers unimportant about that substrata of my body. I felt chronically “dry”, I felt bruised and muscle sore and I felt profoundly stomach-sensitive, light-sensitive, blur-visioned. It felt like the hang-over of all hang-overs and the day after a major diarrhea episode all rolled into one and I was in too much pain and bewilderment to fathom how to get out of it, which is the sudden abandonment of common-sense or solution that always serves as the final nail in the coffin of such an experience. At that point, there is usually such an overwhelming sense of “nothing can be done” that all I want to do is curl up and pull the duvet over my head until the feeling has passed; such weakness, such lethargy – this is fibromyalgia to a tee.
But then the fact I have become the world’s biggest fan of coconut water lately, as the latest-best version of a rehydrator that I have come across, jogged helpfully into my mind. Of course, I always knew coconut water was “good for me” and often have some sitting there in my fridge, usually because my daughter has persuade me to buy some on a whim and I end up being the one to finish it off. Yet it was only fairly recently that I learned about its incredible rehydration properties and the fact it is full of essential minerals that do this so efficiency that, in the absence of saline, coconut water can be rigged up to a drip to save people’s lives. And, of course, Anthony Williams the Medical Medium talks about it, if slightly less enthusiastically than about the celery juice he recommends for the very same reason (as of result of which I have been consuming it daily for the last 6 months, in a shop-bought green juice mixture from Innocent, though last week was the first time I made my own straight celery juice at home…and I was completely unprepared for how salty it tastes – who ever thought of celery as salty, but it really is!) All of this is discussed in that linked article/audio about chronic dehydration.
And, of course, I knew the importance of keeping hydrated (yes, and of electrolytes in the body) but had previously defaulted to water – lots of it. Yet, when I feel like this, it’s as though water doesn’t even touch the sides, in fact the sheer volume of how much I try to consume to replenish my depleted cells only makes my tender stomach hurt all the more, I feel bloated and liquid-filled… and still I hurt…
When it comes to rehydration, coconut water is in a completely different league, I had learned for myself, especially when travelling on planes the last couple of weeks, as I mentioned in my last post Supersensitive Abroad. After all those hours at the airport and on a plane, not to mention staying in a hotel, I found myself craving and searching for it like a pregnant woman on a mission, prepared to drive my car when I could hardly stand just to get to my next supply.
So, somewhere in that murky-headed feeling within the all-consuming pain this morning, I remembered “coconut water” and summoned the last vestiges of willpower to get to the fridge to pour myself the three-quarters of a pint of the stuff that was sitting on my fridge shelf. Here I have to admit to never having drank it in such quantity and first thing in the morning, on an empty stomach, before and boy (like celery) it is surprisingly salty. Five minutes later, I was already feeling so much brighter and more alert, like my body had finally caught up with the way my brain was feeling, which was revealed to be “decidedly sparky”. Another five and, I noticed, the pain had gone down multiple notches from a very high to a moderately low. Fifteen after that and my mind was working over time, I was eager to get out of bed and get doing things and was more than a little startled at the transformation that had just occurred.
A little part of me even took a moment to feel just a bit annoyed, at this point, that I hadn’t known about this across all those years when a crash of such proportions would have had me doubled-up in pain and its aftermath for many hours, even days, at a time.
Of course, I had thought about the possibility that essential minerals were possibly depleted when these pain episodes occurred; had bathed in epsom salts, taken high levels of magnesium, eaten as many bananas as I could manage on such a tender stomach. Had, last summer, gained some relief by sipping well diluted sole (Himalayan salt in water – see my article) throughout the day…but I was always somewhat cautious about how much to drink (given it is salt!) and nothing had come even close to this miracle revival.
Which then, half an hour after it occurred, was followed by a wave of such crashing exhaustion that I just wanted to go back to sleep again…to sleep for a week. So here was the chronic fatigue that I am used to coming like a tsunami as an aftermath to all the pain; only, usually, this would come on (or be noticed…) somewhat later, like a backlash of having coped with so much all-consuming pain to start with. Here, in miniature, in the space of 45 minutes, I was being taken through the whole sequence of pain – rehydration – crashing exhaustion – tender recovery that is the fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue pattern of my last decade. It was like being part of a specially orchestrated experience of what recovery feels like, stage by stage, under laboratory conditions, so I could step back and observe it. And the real mover and shaker in that sequence turned out to be something that delivers electrolytes to the body so rapidly that the whole sequence of recovery speeds up – coconut water. This felt like I was making a very profound connection in the journey of my understanding of what is going on when my body has these reactions to environment.
And a connection in more senses than one since, as an electrical body (which we are!), electrolytes are the body’s connectors…they are the messengers that transports those all-important electrical signals around the central nervous system. So what if “space weather” dumps a whole lot more “messages” on us than we are accustomed to; our bodies “up” their ante for as long as they can, pulling out extra resources from all our organs, our body fluids, last of all our brain (oh the headaches and brain fog that then descend!)…until the electrolytes run out and they just stop coping with all those electrical messages altogether. After that, well, the energetic influx is still happening but it crashes into us now, like a cosmic post-bag thrown against a wall so all the letters spew out; we end up feeling bruised and exhausted, perhaps more than a little frustrated and like we instinctively know something “went wrong” or was interrupted in its very prime. Like a cosmic skype call cut short just as it was getting good, we are left hanging high-and-dry; very dry, at the deep cellular level; hurting, exhausted, disappointed and down.
My sense has always been that these surges in the electromagnetic environment impact us more over night; to do with nighttime changes in the ionosphere, perhaps, and also that we are all sitting ducks while we sleep. Plus, frankly, we are wired to receive our cosmic downloads during our dreamstate in the night; we all know that deep down, right? Particularly since we altered our house so that we have no electricity or wi-fi running while we sleep, I’ve noticed how these highly-charged nights can feel as though we have accidentally left all the electrics on….which tells me how sleeping in an “electic” house gives the nervous system no respite on any day of the year, until we exhaust our nervous systems down to the ground. Our overstimulated bodies act as though they have important messages to deliver around the central nervous system all night long when we sleep bathed in a man-made soup of electro-magnetic noise; which is why my recovery rate has been exponentially boosted, my daytime tiredness felt less pernicious, since installing that isolator switch in our house. Perhaps, also, when we sleep bathed in wi-fi and other such noise, our bodies start to treat those manmade “messages” as more important than they really are or to treat the really important stuff (that comes in at us from our universe) like the boy who cried wolf, hardly listening…so we lose our energetic discernment and our health starts to suffer at a very profound level that science really hasn’t caught up with yet.
So what part do electrolytes play in this equation? We know they are important vehicles for messages delivered by nerves. When they run dry and there are more “messages” than ever to be delivered because our sun is sending them our way, what does this do to the body; does it look and feel like fibromyalgia or chronic fatigue? Could the humble coconut (or celery juice, though harder to get your hands on first thing in the morning) be my answer, my go-to quick antidote?
We know, of course, that electrolytes conduct electricity – which is due to the mobility of the negative and positive ions. When exposed to an electric environment overnight (such as that hotel room I stayed in recently) I certainly sweat more, urinate more…so am I losing electrolytes faster than I can replenish them? The quality of the water we drink also impacts the amount of electrolytes we take in to our bodies; so, I suspect, the fact I drink spring water has probably been of benefit to me for the last five years (I knew it had, this just confirms one of the reasons why). Key mineral electrolytes are sodium or potassium (coconut water is a particularly good source of the latter) and low potassium levels seems to have become something of a modern phenomenon. Some of its symptoms, such as low blood pressure, kidney issues, nausea and constipation and the kind of muscle cramping you would expect after going for a run (I don’t!) are ones that I uniquely associate with times of solar flare or other electromagnetic challenge but which I don’t have going on all of the rest of the time. I strongly suspect electrolytes (perhaps especially potassium) have an effect upon temperature-sensitivity and sudden onset tooth-sensitivity, both of which I associate with these flares (my hands and feet turned white-numb with cold last night, in a perfectly warm house). There are a lot of coincidental cross-references between potassium and dental pain on the internet though, to quote Wikipedia “Potassium-containing toothpastes are common; however, the mechanism by which they may reduce hypersensitivity is unclear”.
When we have sufficient of these electrolytes, we can assume that electrical impulses flow freely, our organs and sensory feedback mechanisms are running optimally and its true; once that coconut water kicked in, I felt super-connected, clearer-headed and more aware than on an average morning; I was having a zillion interconnected thoughts and raring to go. Perhaps keeping our electrolytes replenished is how solar events become the source of massive waves of inspiration and renewal that I’ve long suspected they are intended to be; not these things that tip us over into overwhelm.
Moral of the story, perhaps instead of looking at fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue as something going wrong, or at electrosensitivity like some sort of heinous allergic reaction destined to alienate us from our own lives, its time to acknowledge there may be a plus side that we have been missing. What if our crashes are just slightly off-kilter evolutionary bursts, requiring a small tweak here and there so we can receive energy more efficiently, can tune in more closely to our universe. Is it possible our health “crisis” has been a crash course in getting to know ourselves and our broadest environment at the intimate level, noticing some of the subtleties that other people completely miss? What if all we have learned about our electric selves (which is why we react so to our electric environment) has taught us how to better communicate with the electromagnetic field, choosing what we prefer to tune into and how to make the signals clearer and more efficient to our cells; in other words, grounding the electric signals into the magnetic domain of our bodies. What if our challenges with electricity were all about learning to make friends with the electric universe we are part of and about owning that we ourselves are electric beings, for all we are equally organic and grounded (bringing the yin and yang of ourselves together). What if we are already wired perfectly for this reality and our supersensitivity is just a sign that we are almost there because at least we are responding to our environment, receiving and deciphering the subtler signals…and then some (which many people aren’t…yet).
Perhaps, just when we think we know everything about our bodies and how they react, we can be surprised by something so simple (and which was right beneath our noses all along) being the very thing, the new insight, the dot-connector, that makes all the difference, as happened to me this morning with the coconut water. It takes a certain level of optimism to allow for such a penny to drop yet I believe one of these moments awaits all of us on our healing journey, just as soon as we are wide open to it landing as just the right piece of information we needed to receive to make our next breakthrough.
Final note
I’m not suggesting that drinking coconut water is an instant cure-all for the pain and crash of fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue but, let’s say, the insight it offered to me regarding the part played by electrolytes feels significant. An hour after my super-speedy recovery, I was feeling profoundly depleted and in more subtle but pretty all-consuming body ache (at the level of a flu) once again and – with caution – opted to sip some more coconut water throughout the morning. The effect – I felt revived and relieved of pain all over again; incredible. In fact, another hour into this and I found myself up and dancing to the music like an irrepressible urge had come over me. The key is not to overdo things as there can be such a sudden upsurge of such new vitality and yet energy levels can still behave like a finely poised see-saw for quite some time afterwards, with the potential to suddenly crash or disproportionately injure a cramped muscle around every corner. Perhaps the effect of replenishing electrolytes sufficiently to make a longstanding difference is cumulative…and I intend to experiment.
I added the cautionary note about drinking more because the salt and even sugar in coconut water can have their own unwanted side effects (there are plenty of artcicles about this, such as this on Livestrong) so I would advise against drinking excessive amounts all at once. I’ve also noticed that a sudden influx of potassium or sodium can cause a wave of too much sensation, like electrical stabbing pains or even heart flutters (as though neurotransmitters suddenly go into overdrive) – which can be alarming and is one to watch. Note also that not all coconut water sources are equal – some, can you believe, have added sugar and other ingredients (seek out 100% pure).
Of course, there are other things you can do once electrolytes have been replenished somewhat, to encourage and continue the recovery process. I would like to stress that it is important to take things very gently for the next few hours, to keep off cellular technology and (ideally) wi-fi, to be outside in nature if possible, though not physically exerting much, and to expect to spend a very quiet day after such a crash…yes, even if you feel somewhat better! Even if the electrolyte flush makes you feel sparky and inspired, I would caution against diving into (either physical or mental) projects but, rather, recommend that you embrace the way that such times can bring massive waves of intuition and insight…so just flow with that meditative vibe (without doing too much with the information that comes in) and enjoy the ride.
Don’t forget this obvious thing – keep drinking plenty of good quality water (but not excessive amounts; instinct tells me that as an average-build woman I should be drinking about 3 litres a day, which I admit I don’t always manage). I also love (and look forward to) my pot of green tea in the morning but have known for a long time to skip this on such days as the caffeine (even though balanced by the calming effect of l-theanine in green tea) makes me even more dehydrated. Again, I recommend Anthony Williams’ blog post about Chronc Dehydration for more about drinks that rehydrate (and those that do the very opposite). I will be making a celery juice later!
Lastly, I do feel this is only the tip of a very large iceberg and that there is much more food for thought along the fibromyalgia-electroltye pathway. Keeping coconut water and celery juice in my daily diet, I will be watching to see if the effect is indeed cumulative or, in any other way, problematic and will report back with any observations or side effects.
Since posting this article I tripped upon a great description of the importance of mineral salts on the Medical Medium’s blogpage:
To understand the importance of these natural mineral salts, we have to take a closer look at how our brains are designed. The brain is filled with neurons. Each neuron has an electrical impulse that crosses from one side of the neuron to the other with the support of neurotransmitter chemicals. These electrical impulses need sodium, potassium, magnesium, chloride, and glucose to zip across the neurons successfully. Unfortunately, when someone experiences severe stress or pressure, the neurotransmitter chemicals diminish and the electrical impulses no longer have the support they need to cross the neurons. The electrical impulses may heat up as they try to cross the neurons and can begin to short circuit as a result. If enough electrical impulses short circuit in someone’s brain, there is a high likelihood that the person may become addicted to something such as unhealthy foods because brain fog, confusion, and fatigue often result in excess hunger. In these moments, what your body actually needs is glucose and mineral salt rich foods which can help cool down the electrical impulses and support the neurotransmitter chemicals. Incorporating the heavy metal detox daily is another important practice as you heal from an addiction. By clearing heavy metals out of the brain, you can make room in the brain for neurotransmitter chemicals to build up and thrive once again.
See source article HERE.
The Medical Medium advocates celery juice as a source of electrolytes, which makes a good addition or alternative to coconut if, for some reason, you find yourself intolerant to coconut (yep, it happened to me – see Get down to business with healing the gut).
Disclaimer:
This blog, its content and any material linked to it are presented for informational purposes only. They are not a substitute for medical advice, diagnosis, treatment, or prescribing. The material and opinions shared are anecdotal and should not be considered to be medical advice or diagnosis. Please consult with a licensed healthcare professional before altering or discontinuing any medications, treatment, diet or supplementation program, or if you have or suspect you might have a health condition that requires medical attention.
Living whole 