Our personal version of alchemy is so often performed without even thinking about it, when lost in those tasks that take us deep into ourselves, into our innate knowing and our joy. So often, we learn to treat such activities as self-indulgent, pointless or plain weird and yet, the paradox is, they often hold he key to our deepest transformation...in other words, they are exactly what we need to be doing right now.
We arrive in this world wide-open to things that neurotypicals seem to have no idea or sense of and with trusting hearts so full of unconditional love, such transparency and truth, such an all-pervading knowledge of the sameness of all living creatures, that it takes a lifetime of being told we are wrong to perfect the structures that hold us intact, in spite of such a tide of contradiction to what we still know and hold so tenderly inside.
Why do we long for diagnosis, for validation, for something so fixed to get a grip on and is it always such a great idea? What happens when we court the softer possibilities, a nonlinear or quantum approach...or mix this up with a plan of action that leaves room for both? A personal review of these topics from a fibromyalgia perspective.
Synesthesia has overlaps with heightened sensitivity and both have overlaps with chronic pain. All of these phenomenon overlap in me so you can see why I am so interested. It's as though chronic pain is the down side of the see-saw on which synaesthesia is the colourful gift at the highest end (I really wouldn't be without it and the sensory adventures it takes me on) and sensitivity is the mixing pot of both, made up of both pluses and minuses, depending on how challenging these heightened sensitivities make the experience of life. Exploring the sensory soup of these cross-over phenomenon, asking whether we are all born with synesthesia as science is now suggesting and looking into all the potential a deeper understanding of them holds for transforming human experience.
Another seminal post (from my other website) from 2014 in which I share an epiphany I had, when reading Jill Bolte Taylor’s incredible book “My Stroke of Insight” and realised how this related to the brain fog aspect of Fibromyalgia. What followed was such a rolling process of coming to understand some of the “whys” of Fibromyagia and the relationship between the left and right hemispheres of the brain that it feels important to reshare this at the beginning of a new blog that is all about finding wholeness.
All along the road that has been the fibromyalgia years, ‘brain fog’ (an appropriately wooly term used to describe a myriad of ‘brain symptoms’) has been such a significant part of what I have been experiencing…and, in fact, its one of the most consistently talked about aspects of fibromyalgia on forums and websites. Yet it has generally been underplayed…by me and by them…as some sort of unfortunate side effect of all the ‘other stuff’ going on with fibromyalgia, which is generally described as ‘widespread body pain’ and relatively little to do with the brain at all. What if we are stepping around the elephant in the room and our understanding of fibromyalgia’s brain symptoms is entirely pivotal to everything that is going on here?
And here’s a thought; what if fibromyalgia and any one of a long list of other chronic illnesses weren’t a sign of something ‘going wrong’ but…
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Living whole 