Exploring all the many reasons boosting oxytocin can be so important for someone that is autistic, who suffers from chronic pain or has dysautonomia issues such as POTs, amongst all the other benefits.
A combination of having a blind spot when it comes to your own emotions (alexithymia) and a lifetime of fear around unleashing strong emotions.not to mention the stockpile of anger, frustration and trauma from all the difficult years before diagnosis, can conspire to push strong emotions deep into the body. Exploring how autistic challenges such as these could manifest as chronic illness and especially chronic pain.
How much do epigenetic components, mere accidents of circumstance, parenting styles, and other peoples expectations feed into chronic states of health, not least when you are autistic and have been entrained, all your life, to adhere to behaviours that fail to meet the preferences, abilities or sensitivities of your neurotype? Is chronic illness a form of demand avoidance that takes shape in the autistic body when it refuses to continue being ignored as before?
What happens when huge amounts of energy get stuck in the body as trauma, leading to a freeze response or shutdown? How does this intersect with chronic conditions such as CFS, fibromyalgia, sensory defensiveness or other syndromes and does being autistic make you more prone to this? How can somatic therapies be used to discharge years of trauma? Exploring through my own deep-dive into the territory.
In Ehlers Danlos, muscle spasm and rigidity is a compensatory measure for hypermobility, to stabilise the joint. As such, it stems from a different cause to what is typical (not tightness as for most people but a response from the central and peripheral nervous system) and thus requires a different approach, but what? Exploring the possibilities via therapy and listening to your own body as a primary approach.
We mostly have such an awkward relationship with our emotions yet, really, they are our closest allies, if only we knew how to work with them. Deep diving the colourful world of emotions and how these relate to healing, releasing and becoming ourselves.
If only I could convince everyone that spends their days tied to a sofa, who feels trapped by ever-worsening symptoms of some chronic illness, or state of overwhelmment, or other to give qigong a go…because I would dearly love them to reap all the benefits that I have this year. Living with chronic conditions can feel like a never ending series of mountains you have to climb but with qigong in my arsenal I seem to triumph more often than not and my mornings have become "what do I want to do today?" more so than"what do I have to deal with next?".
When we notice how our bodies work so closely (as does eveything in nature) with the cycles of waxing and waning, we gain the tremendous power that comes from accepting what is and ceasing to resist the natural rhythms that can also be our best source of strength when we harness them for our recovery.
The natural response of the mind is often to shut-down vague recollections of some past event that you don't remember fondly but there lies the problem...we shut it down consciously, yet the body continues to harbour the irritation or pain, at the subconscious level, which then has no choice but to manifest as imbalance or some other symptom, that feeling of perpetuation in the body (on and on and on in perpetuity = "chronic") and, of course, where one "off-kilter" energy tends to linger, other sticky energies will attract, leading to escalation (the "snowball" effect).
Introversion, visual or non-linear thinking, social anxiety, chronic or social fatigue, autism, high sensitivity...looking at all the many, often overlapping, factors that might make writing preferable to conversation for a lot of people and considering is this wrong, of just wonderfully different?
Living whole 