power of thought

Are you becoming more aligned with yourself than you realised?

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Has your year been really challenging in lots of ways….but….when you allow yourself to pull back and gain the overview, you can sense just how positively impactful and on track it has all really been? Can you sense how you have actually been getting much more in alignment with who you really are all along the way, if not always by the most predictable or tidy means? Can you sense that it has all been part of a new level of alignment taking shape, as though something is being orchestrated, however chaotic it may sometimes seem to be at the ground level? If you can even mildly glean that this applies to you then take pause for a moment in order to fully allow the realisation of this to swell in your consciousness. Take some time out at the end of the year to appreciate just how far you have come, no matter how messy or symptomatic your life still seems from within, and maybe jot down some of those things that have improved for you. Because its just so important, for your ongoing sense of progression, to notice how much nearer you now are to some aspiration you hold dear, unfinished business though it may all seem in this moment, or to notice all those many pieces of self-knowledge you wouldn't want to give back in exchange for easier circumstances, as have been picked up along the way. This is how we give ourselves the ongoing momentum to continue moving forwards, not to mention how we come to see the bigger picture of the way our lives are truly playing out so that we aren't always bogged down in the small stuff.

Cultivating the fierce self-compassion you need to keep your essence intact

~ Helen White ~ 1 Comment

Unnecessary exposures to sadness, negativity and grief suck vital life force out of people; take this from a hypersensitive person who knows all too well the cost to health. Learning how to fiercely curate the amount of exposure to negativity that we can cope with as an exercise in self-compassion.

Learning to slow down

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Letting a day of nothing in particular be an accomplishment, even more so than a day of “productivity”, is a necessary mind re-program I am steadily adopting for my health. Allowing myself to feel equally good about myself and, most importantly, relaxed because I managed to go slow today rather than ticking things off a list is a crucial reinvention of myself on the way towards, somewhere down the line, reaping a far healthier nervous system than I ever had in my life. I’m playing the long game now, the fruits of my labours no longer some transient thrill gained from fighting down another dragon but the slow and steady harvest gained from peaceful seeds planted in the ground on some equally slow and steady day and all the intervening patience I had to watch them grow. 

A need for more (positive) stimulation

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Positive stimulation is just so important to a person's recovery out of the cycle of chronic illness. Life has taught me that through experience this year...you have to be almost brazen in your courage and willingness to be positively stimulated to break out of the snake eating its own tail effect of assuming that all you need is quiet, routine and rest.

On oxalates, emotions, self-protection, autism and releasing: a hypothesis

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Exploring the idea that certain chronically painful bodies have formed the habit of storing oxalates (toxic anti-nutrients) from common food sources in order to protect us when, really, this only does great harm...and how to get out of the subconscious mindset of vulnerability in order to heal.

Coping with sadness for what has been lost through chronic health

~ Helen White ~ 4 Comments

There comes a time, in chronic illness, where you have to address a profound need to be left alone, to carve your own space, time to put down all attempt at social skills to go mute and self-focused, devoid of all expectations from others to do or react or say the right things and just "be" in the dark void with whatever it is that is happening to you. There has to be time and space for you to pull into yourself, to lick your own wounds and to grieve your own losses which, though less overt than an actual "death", are a kind of bereavement all of their own...a deep sadness for the health you once had, the person you used to be, the hopes you once nurtured. This, like any bereavement, takes time and space and solitude enough to process. My craving for solitude is extremely high right now, perhaps no different to how any wounded or traumatised mammal will withdraw to its den in order to attempt to self-regulate its highly overstimulated nervous system in a way that can only ever be done by curling up, alone. No amount of kind gestures or people wanting to fuss or help out can play substitute for this need to be alone and look our current state in the eyes, to intuit what we most need and to search for the means to initiate the body's own healing process, which is not something you "do" but, instead, patiently wait for with whatever small iota of faith that you have left.