Learning To Heal Long Covid CFS/ME

 What happens when you stop externalizing the causes of your symptoms? What happens when you look for healing within those very symptoms that present themselves to you? 

We are in constant dialogue with our bodies whether we are aware of it or not. Our nervous system is always working with us and for us, informing us of dangers or safety within the body or without. When we are in danger, either real or perceived  our body will inform us, via the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic system will send chemicals coursing through our body increasing our heart rate and respiration, our blood pressure will go up, pupils will constrict, our thinking will become faster and oftentimes more focused. We may or may not be aware of these bodily changes as we go about our day. In a relaxed or safe environment our heart will beat at its normal resting levels, our blood pressure will normalize to baseline, our pupils will dialate. We feel safe and comfortable. Our thinking will be of a different kind and tone, wider, perhaps, and more creative. We will feel a comfortable openness. These events occur on a subconscious level and depending on our level of awareness, can occur without us knowing they do. These are unconscious processes. 

What we are feeling when we have the myriad of highly uncomfortable symptoms of deep fatigue, dizziness, brain fog, muscle weakness and sensitivities to light and sound, etc. is an autonomic nervous system that is stuck in fight/flight/freeze mode. Your nervous system is working overtime and is literally frozen in the fight/flight response. No amount of rest or relaxation, meditation, breath work  or any other relaxing modality will move you into the parasympathetic mode. It will also not prevent you from getting CFS/ME/Long Covid, as I'll explain in a later post. Resting and relaxing and being very careful with energy expenditure will certainly help, but it's not a recipe for healing.

What is healing, and what I learned, is to develop a dialogue, based on symptoms, that will help you to trigger healing. This means turning your attention away from medicalizing symptoms, and away from medical research that every sufferer I know has done. The reason for this is twofold. Remember I said it's necessary to dialogue with your body? This is the start. You are in a relationship with your body. When you are researching symptoms, cataloguing symptoms and visiting doctors, you are reinforcing the fact that you are very very sick and very very debilitated. Secondly, when  you do this, your body is in a state of resistance or fear. You are simply adding to the extreme stress your body is under, you're feeding it more stress, and inevitably more symptoms. You are feeding your mind/body connection, and you're  feeding it junk food. 

If you've ever read stories of extraordinary healing, ( meaning those with incurable cancers, etc)  as I did when I was sick, you will find that there is one common denominator amongst those who recovered. That one thing was to relax. Deeply. Not in a meditation/yoga/breath work /accunpuncture way, but in an attitude or feeling  of non resistance. What this means for the CFS/ME/Long Covid sufferer  is to stop resisting symptoms. It means that when you feel an increase in symptoms, or you  feel a crash coming on , that you don't react with the usual and very understandable dread and fear. Don't resist the symptoms,  allow them. You  develop a  feeling state of allowance. This tells the nervous system that you aren't really in danger, because you aren't tensing up and fighting. You are allowing. You'd be surprised at how far this one behavioral intervention  will take you in terms of lessening the intensity of symptoms. And you've started a conscious dialogue with your body.