Supplements

The vagus nerve: leading us back to our health

~ Helen White ~ 2 Comments

There's literally nothing to lose and everything to gain from a healthier vagus nerve. Like all the best paths, it starts out a little mysterious but that's where its adventure lies. I've certainly had cause to explore it lately as its been found to have just so many links with the most chronic, mysterious, health conditions....and here's what I found out (to my benefit, maybe yours). So, having found it and become so much more aware of it, I like to think the vagus nerve is a path worth following as, so it turns out, it may very well lead us back to ourselves in more ways than one!

Some thoughts on hay fever and gluten

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

I don’t want to add to the mountain of anecdotal coincidences that already muddle the health-matters domain when they are treated as “fact” but I want to share these observations about my own hay fever symptoms in relation to gluten consumption in case they hold any substance. As celebrated in one of my earlier posts … Continue reading Some thoughts on hay fever and gluten

Beyond meaning

~ Helen White ~ 2 Comments

Where there is no joy left, we can be sure we have excluded the right-brained perspective. When all we can see is the hard wall of the corridor we are apparently walking and the printed signs and arrows on those wall saying we "must" go this way or that, we can be sure we have lost the over-view and its an imprisonment of sorts. "Down there' we can only go one or maybe two or three routes (some of its junctions are confusing thus they seem to offer choices...) but we have lost the very point of the journey if we no longer experience the very joy that makes us want to be here in a human body. So if diagnosis only brings limitation and fear, we need to make sure we don't lose sight of that other perspective...the broader perspective that allows us to see the whole point.

A thing about mornings

~ Helen White ~ 2 Comments

Do you struggle, I mean really struggle, to adjust to getting back into your body in the mornings? Even when there's absolutely nothing to worry about, there's no stress, no unhealthy lifestyle habits to explain it, nothing that could be making your cortisol peak when you wake, do you somehow know that you are treading a very fine line as you re-enter your conscious state each day? Have you had to entrain your family to tread very softly around you first thing in the morning because loud noises or sudden announcements get your heart racing, switch on pain? Even when you are perfectly chilled in your mind, ecstatic with life even, is this your "normal" experience of waking; like it's a precision manoeuver? Its a vata kind of a thing...and there are things you should know about how to make this easier.

Super-sensitive abroad

~ Helen White ~ Leave a comment

Travelling away from home can be an extra-challenge for those of us with health challenges and sensitivities of any kind because it takes us out of our routine. It's not so much the distance but the upheaval that can be difficult to cope with (on top of the extra tiredness that comes with travel) when you probably have well-established survival tactics in place at home that enable you to cope pretty well with your health most of the time. Booking a holiday can feel a bit like planning to blow all that carefully created homeostasis to pieces in the name of having fun and there have been times when I wonder why I do it; is it even worth it (the answer, by the way, is yes). Changes in sleep arrangements and diet can throw health into disarray when maintaining that balance has become a finely tuned thing.