How to heal and create harmony

When I first fell ill, over three years ago, I set out to discover the root cause of my dis-ease.

I already understood that a combination of the right diet with the correct blend of vitamins, herbs and mineral supplements, alongside a positive attitude to life and regular kinesiology treatments would go a long way towards reducing inflammation, and thereby set me on the path towards healing.

I also knew that the healing process would involve looking back and excavating those craggy old emotional nooks and crannies of life that had become embedded in my psyche and were contributing to the disruption of my physical health.

But above all I understood that my symptoms of extreme fatigue, brain fog and physical aches and pains were evidence of a deeper problem, of an unhealthy ecology.

What do I mean by this?

We are a living, breathing, interconnected system. We are spiritual beings in physical form. We pulse with biochemical and electrical impulses, which are changing constantly within and without us, and are affecting every aspect of our being. When our ecology is good, every part of us thrives.

The most powerful disrupters of our health are childhood trauma and dysfunction of the gut and microbiome. I know that these factors (which are often connected) and others led to the later disruption of my health.

If I look back through my life, I can see clearly all the existing factors that lay the foundations for disrupting my health further down the line:

I was born by caesarean section, which means that I didn’t receive my mother’s gut flora, which resulted in my not starting life with the strongest gut. If I had known then what I know now I could have guessed which illnesses and health issues would be coming my way.

I was diagnosed with coeliac disease at the age of five months old (which damages the gut lining).

I had shingles at the age of two.

I had a stormy childhood (the stress of which undoubtedly exacerbated my gut problems).

As a teenager and young adult I had a diet high in gluten and sugar, lacking vital nutrients that my body needed for optimal function in my gut, brain and endocrine system.

I suffered from regular and debilitating depressive episodes throughout my teen years and my twenties.

I experienced repeated bouts of tonsillitis as a teen and in my early twenties (a consequence of years of an unhappy gut) which were consistently treated with antibiotics. I also remember an aggressive bout of gastroenteritis, treated with antibiotics. I also suffered with repeated bouts of sinusitis - each time antibiotics were thrown at it. This all further disrupted my microbiome.

I experienced some particularly stressful events in my young adult life, and one particularly prolonged bout of stress in that same period. I then experienced one highly stressful event later in life which then acted as the trigger for my auto-immune illness to take hold. Even twenty-four hours of stress can disrupt the balance of the microbiome. Extended periods of stress without stress relief distresses the gut, imbalances our hormonal system and severely disrupts the microbiome.

My father had been diagnosed with M.E., my sister with glandular fever. Therefore I had a genetic disposition towards chronic auto-immune conditions. But I know that this alone would not have resulted in my subsequent auto-immune illness. It was because of the presence of the environmental factors (dodgy gut, stress etc) that the genes were given the opportunity to express themselves in illness.

If we look back through our lives we are given clues as to how we got to where we are now. I call it the snowball effect. It’s like a snowball rolling down a hill. If we can identify the snowball at the top of the hill, and then prevent it from rolling, we can stop a cascade of inflammatory and immunological events that can lead to autoimmune disease further down the road.

It feels like a dominoes effect, of one negative process triggering further negative processes. Disease is a process, rather than something isolated that needs to be erased. We need to be thinking about removing the dis-ease in order to reverse the process.

To achieve one hundred percent optimal function we need to assume the role of a body detective (or employ one) to help find the root cause of our problems and then help to solve them.

When I examined my illness, however, I didn’t see multiple disorders (ie: fatigue, brain fog etc); I saw one underlying problem with multiple manifestations. I knew there was one solution to restore multiple functions. The solution was not to eliminate my chronic fatigue ‘disease’, but rather to restore harmony and restore my ecology. In this way I could truly heal.