Beaking down "what happens" when you flare-up and coming to understand why your body migth tend to resort to these responses to certain triggers, usually in an effort to help you (an understanding that can occur to you when you slow down enough to listen, instead of letting fear lead the research party) can make for a big breakthrough in managing these dips...
How long have you felt like an alien landed on the wrong planet? Its something that needs be felt into if you are an Aspie, in order to fully respect yourself for just how long you have had to swim upstream against the flow; so you can appreciate the sheer tenacity and determination with which you try…and keep on trying….to fit in, speaking and receiving words and behaviours that don't compute and yet always having to step forwards to meet others far more readily than they ever come to meet you. It's a thankless task and now it's time to thank yourself. Bringing your Asperger's into the equation can even help you cope with some of your most triggering circumstances because now you have logic on your side (and you know how much we love logic). Here's my example...
Why does the kind of stiffness that can be likened to rigor mortis occur in the body of someone with fibromyalgia; are there any clues why that could happen in a living-breathing person? Rigor "stiffness" mortis "of death" says it all really....it is a condition of death so what makes it appear within life for just so many people, resulting in a kind of half-life. I had been here before but this time I wanted to get to the bottom of the mystery...
Its our natural state to go to ground at this time of year; a bit like the glorious red maple leaves which, in my garden, are being mulched by rain and heavy dew to become next year's earthy sustenance wherever they fall. We go to ground not to vacate ourselves or deplete but to go into our most authentic selves more deeply, refinding the soulful aspect that brighter days tend to chase away with their spotlight and busy-ness. No wonder this time of the year is known as All Souls; for its not just the souls of the dead but all of our spirits that shake off flesh and bone and take off to fly free in all the hours of dreaming and slowing down as days become dark and cold. This hibernation is more akin to the seed that is fuelling itself with new imaginings of what it wants to be next year; the metamorphosis that looks like dying but which is really all about creativity and aspiration.
It's time to own your energetic stature. That is, accept that energetically speaking, you are immense...far taller, broader, more majestic than your physical form suggests so accept that, allow it to unfurl and hold your energetic head up high. Instead of recoiling from life, allow your energy field to stretch up to the heady peaks of your capacity; which you can do just as soon as you are well grounded, with a roaring hearth firing in your belly and a glow in your heart. This is what it looks like to live in near-perfect balance and trees show us this (and so much more)...
The extreme effects that resulted when two of us revisited eating sugar after a long break from it reminded me that these are the normal outcome of sugar consumption for all people. So the variance isn't in the biological effects but in how much people notice them or have adapted to shield themselves from, or absorb, the backlash (though the resultant health issues are seldom avoided so much as redirected into another form of expression; often a more severe health issue, further down the line). Most people push on through the effects of sugar without really acknowledging that they are there; as I know I did, for years. The more we consume the crazy amount of sugar our modern diet makes almost compulsory and extremely (shockingly) normal, the more we become (ironically) immune to it as the nervous system is pushed over the limit to where it has no choice but to turn down its own sensitivity to everything, even those things we want to experience, in order to cope; like a form of self-created paralysis. Its as though sugar only knows one setting - one that makes us receive more sensation, delivered in the most abrasive way possible and it is more than our nervous system, which longs to experience many things but wants to be way more discerning than that, can cope with. We become over-stimulated...and so we break down or are forced to buffer ourselves like we are under constant attack and, of course, some of us stop feeling at all.
Trying to describe to people I haven't seen for years the health challenges I have so they can relate, I found myself using the word "neuralgia" and this set me off wondering what this typically relates to, what commonly causes it, in terms other people can grasp. This new lead-in (seeing things from other people's perspective) prompted me … Continue reading Shingles without the rash?
So, if you have mystery, unshiftable, constantly morphing and moving pain affecting anything from your back to the toes and soles of your feet, to your teeth or your ears, the nerves or circulation in arms, legs or hands or those weird toxic headaches that are almost (but not quite) like a migraine and that come and go for no apparent reason, in fact anything that might seem like nerve pain, this topic might be relevant to you and the following article is the most plain-speaking introduction to the it that I've come across. If its not a recovery appoach that you've considered then, you never know, opening this door might be just what you need to get the new year off to a far brighter start.
That thing that I do most(!) mornings on my yoga mat probably doesn't bear scrutiny from anyone who attends a yoga class or really knows their stuff...its not "proper", its not pretty, its not lengthy, its just what I do (a mixture of what I've learned, what feels good, movements I've half invented); but the key is in the words "I do it". I know of plenty of yoga aficionados who still only do yoga when they go to a class. Sometimes I roll movements together so much I feel like I'm a butterfly about to take off then, at other times, I use long pauses and gravity to do the work with me, holding positions until my body tells me to stop, a method that can deliver exquisite release to some of the deepest entanglements. The sense of fine tuning what my body is most asking for, to my own rhythm, has been palpable and the real gift of home practice; being unique to me and that most-intimate inner dialogue (the one that starts with the invitation "show me what you want and I will do that" without uttering a word) and not something that could follow the rhythm of a teacher or class. A conversation such as this, based utterly upon trust, is one that never (ever) stops again but, rather, carries on spreading its magic across all aspects of your daily life. Approaching yoga in this ad-hoc way, the mat remains somewhere that I'm accomplished, doing something that its impossible for me to do wrong or badly (which is a good starting point to get to know this truth about all of life). In listening to my body, what it wants, what it calls out for (today...which may not be the same as yesterday), I do something that is a central tenet of what yoga is all about and that takes me into that same hallowed space where the alchemy of yoga really happens. Like a meditation or a pause for breath, a moment of grace in a life that can be physically challenging, a demonstration of pure self-love and of listening to what my body is telling me, I get there...all on my own.
By virtue of its key role - preparing for an egg - oestrogen has come to stand for and embody a protective urge. It dominates the process by which we prepare for and protect that egg before its release into the world; it safeguards the hoped-for pregnancy yet only travels as far as the threshold of that potential being realised, stepping no further forward with it, like a mother stood waving at the door. It knows only "hold" and "protect" as its inner mantra - and this is oestrogen in a nutshell, without frills and, yes, generalised down to its very essence as we all know that not every egg leads to the realisation of a new beginning, nor do we want it do. Yet there is a very real truism in this stereotype of oestrogen as the egg-holder, the homemaker, coddling her creation tightly to her bosom because, when a women is in her oestrogen phase, this is what a woman tends to do and there is very real evidence that she becomes single-minded, withdrawn and less independent during that phase. To quote Leslie Kenton (Passage to Power: Natural Menopause revolution) "She is more willing to adjust herself to the needs of others. When oestrogens are running, women like to attract a mate not so much to draw him into her body as to comfort, admire and care for her. Her ovaries seem to be smiling - 'whatever you want, I'm happy to give' they seem to say". She continues: "A few women who by nature are high oestrogen producers feel quite dependent on others for approval, and for the definition of their being". Any wonder that so many doctors, even some husbands, have been so keen on advocating oestrogen hormone replacement in order to maintain this personality type in favour of its alternative, the independent, outward-thinking woman...
Living whole 