Despite LinkedIn’s warnings, I accept connections from almost everyone on there who asks me to. In my mind, the purpose of networking is to meet new people. Most of the time, this philosophy works well. Occasionally someone connects with me to spam me with their services; at that point I disconnect from them. Today’s example was an email from a business coach who claims to be an intuitive focusing on the divine feminine. I had initially thought we might have something in common. However, the beginning of the message read:

Are You Ready to Break Free from Exhausting Hourly Sessions?
Are You Ready to Make More Money Working Less Hours? 

I was aghast as I read those words. To me, a great translation of the rhetorical questions being asked is, “Do you think you’re too good to actually help people who are paying for and need your help?” Individual work is at the core of what I and many other coaches and therapists offer. It’s not exhausting to me; it’s very uplifting most of the time. It’s a sacred call that I’ve received to assist others. If someone doesn’t like working with clients individually, then being a coach is not the right job for them. If they’re feeling drained by it all the time, they may need to examine their energetic boundaries to make sure they’re working in a protected space that keeps them from absorbing their patients’ problems. (That is something I help clients with if they desire it since it’s an issue for many empaths and intuitives.)

Spiritual arrogance is all too common in this world. People who think they’ve found the divine (or God or whatever word you prefer) let their newfound spiritual prowess go immediately to their head. They are certain that their intimate knowledge of Spirit has made them better than anyone else; for some of them, this is so much so that they can’t be bothered to interact with others learning to grow. Some of them just want to stand on a podium, shine in their greatness, and accept the awe-filled laurels that they believe they deserve from the masses. Of course, working from a warped interpretation of the law of attraction, they’re certain their spiritual nature and connection to the divine will allow them to attract millions of dollars by doing nothing more than just being their wonderful selves.

Here’s a hint, though: The more arrogant that someone is about their spiritual abilities and the more they need to display their divine connection overtly, the less connection they are likely to have. Most of the time, those who list a long heritage of gurus or teachers, especially those who connect them linearly to a divine teacher such as Jesus or a saint, are really very insecure in their own knowledge and abilities, so they rest on the laurels of others. In contrast, some of the holiest people we’ll ever meet are the ones who are examples of modesty and humility. They’re confident in their connection with the divine and their purpose here on earth. They go about their business, helping others as they do. They don’t seek fame and easy fortune. They just want to live in peace and want the same for others, too.

There’s an old adage that if something seems too good to be true, it probably is. This doesn’t apply to just miracle medical cures and get rich quick schemes. People who promise you amazing divine knowledge from one easy course are likely speaking from a place of greed and arrogance, not holiness. They are likely involved in a pyramid scheme of confused people, and following their way is not likely to bring you the amazing things you are hoping for. The same is true of healers who promise that all of your problems can be solved in one workshop or with one supplement. It’s very rarely (if ever) true. The slow and steady path is often the best one to take for personal growth. Even if it’s prompted by a sudden tragic event, the growth from that single event will not happen overnight in most cases. Instead, change has to happen through honest and diligent work.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Many parents in our society have a twisted idea that they know what is best for their children at all times. This issue goes far beyond telling a child they have to wear a seatbelt in the car, a legitimate responsible requirement for any parent to make of a child. Rather, these overbearing parents make decisions for everything in their children’s lives. Many children are forced into schools, friendships, sports, jobs, and even relationships that are arranged by their parents rather than following their own hearts, dreams and desires.

I have recently been watching The Carrie Diaries, the prequel to Sex and the City, which follows the adventures of high schooler Carrie Bradshaw. The series has some of the same themes as Sex in the City such as female camaraderie and a love of fashion, but it’s a very different show about teenagers coming of age. As juniors in high school, the reality of “the real world” is just around the horizon. After one dismal Thanksgiving dinner, two of Carrie’s friends, Maggie and Walt, a mismatched couple, discuss the role of parents and their future.

By the time I got to high school, I realized that I didn't want to be a doctor at all. I knew I wanted to be a teacher. However, I knew that I couldn't share my dreams with my mother because her narcissistic self would never allowed my dreams to be considered. What she wanted for me was all that mattered regardless of how I actually felt about it. Instead of following her dreams for me, though, I made plans to attend a major state university where almost any degree was a possibility as an undergrad. Once I got to college, I declared myself a history and English double major pursuing secondary certification. By that time, my mother was no longer actively in my life, but the rest of my extended family responded with disapproval. I was told by more than one person, “But you’re too smart to become a teacher!” Um? First of all, don’t we want our children’s teachers to be smart? And second, didn't my desires matter at all? I decided that my family’s opinions were irrelevant since it was my life. I couldn't bear the thought of being a doctor or lawyer like they were encouraging, so I did what I wanted to do.

Did I stay in teaching for my entire life? No. Do I believe it was a mistake for me to have walked down that road? Not at all. It was what I was meant to do with the earlier part of my life. Teaching has been foundational in my subsequent careers. I still believe that I am a teacher, but I no longer teach traditional subjects in a traditional classroom. Instead, I am teaching individuals and groups in informal settings, hourly appointments and private classes. Most importantly, though, was that it was my decision to make. I needed to follow my own heart and desires.

Now, as my children are facing high school career paths (a recent, misguided, and developmental inappropriate idea in Texas schools courtesy of the state legislature) and the eventual graduation to college majors, I have to let them make their own decisions. That doesn't mean that I don’t want them to be realistic. My daughter voiced that she wanted to be a photography major, and I love that she loves photography as much as she does. Still, I explained to her the realities of a career in photography. In our modern world, it is very difficult to sustain oneself as a photographer. I encouraged her to pursue a degree in photography but to also double major in another field that she loves or to structure her degree in such a way that she can broaden her employment skills. She seemed to understand that reality and is taking design and Photoshop classes that are giving her practical but fun skills. Who knows what she’ll actually do in her life, but the final decision will be hers to make.

As Carrie Bradshaw’s father confronts her boss, Larissa Loughton, at the magazine where Carrie took the new internship unbenounced to him, the following conversation ensues:

My kids and I completed watching Star Trek: The Next Generation plus its ensuing movies a while back, and now we have moved on to Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. I've never been able to get into DS9 the way I enjoyed other modern Star Trek series, but my one son loves it so we’re watching the series via Netflix. In episode 10 of season 2, a new humanoid species arrives as refugees at the space station. The Skrreea are a matriarchal society, something that comes across as shocking to the station’s crew. Haneek, the only woman who arrives in the first group of four to the station, talks with the leadership of DS9 about her culture as they discuss the impending arrival three million more Skrreea from the Delta Quadrant:

Clearly this is meant to be a parody of the biased and erroneous statement we often hear in our society that women suffer from too many hormonal mood changes that therefore make them unsuitable for powers of leadership including politics. There’s a terrible age old joke about how a pre-menstrual President would be far too likely to hit the big red button and start a nuclear war. In Skrreean society, men's emotions are seen as troublesome just as women's emotions are seen as almost dangerous in ours.

The real truth is that we are all emotional creatures regardless of our sex or gender. We all feel and we all act on those feelings. While higher levels of testosterone may make some people more aggressive and higher levels of progesterone may make some people more likely to cry, the bottom line is that we all have emotions that we feel overwhelmed by. How we act on those emotions is probably influenced by both nature (hormones) and nurture (what our society teaches us the gender-specific appropriate response is).

Another truth that our society is very afraid of at times is that all of us possess a masculine side and all of us contain a feminine side. We all have traits that are seen as male and others that are seen as female. What most of us don’t have is a good balance of those traits because we are afraid to embrace one side or the other. In her seminal work Living in the Light, especially in chapters 8 and 9, Shakti Gawain discusses the feminine and masculine within each of us. As Gawain explains, the feminine side of us is the nurturing, intuitive side. We all are nurturing on some level, though not all of us are called to be parents. Still, we know how to care for others around us who are family members, friends, or lovers. We also have intuition, though since the Enlightenment, our science-dominated society has taught many of us to suppress this intuition in favor of rational thought. Unfortunately, our society sees this nurturing and intuitive side as weak and powerless. This is far from the truth. Our intuition can be one of the strongest ways we live if we allow it to be a part of our lives. Men who are in touch with their feminine side, who aren't afraid to follow their intuition or feel their emotions (aside from anger and aggression), are often judge by our society for being weak and feeble as the feminine is poorly stereotyped as such; the media crucifying Howard Dean in the 2004 election season for expressing what was seen as unacceptable passion is an excellent example. In contrast, the masculine side within all of us is the action side. It is the part of us that follows the understanding of the feminine intuition in order to make things happen. Men are expected to be doers, to be problems solvers. Women who have this same strong masculine action side are judged by society as being too “butch” or too unfeminine; Hillary Rodham Clinton is a prime example. However, we all have to be people who take action if we want to accomplish anything in life!

This disturbing division of the feminine and the masculine in our society is based on unhealthy stereotypes. Even in my own life, I've experienced quite a bit of judgment because I am “too masculine” since I am a strong, highly-organized, educated woman who doesn't hesitate to act on what will help her life. I had a male friend act surprised when I said that I missed having opportunities to dress up in frilly dresses; he erroneously presumed that since I didn’t wear makeup I didn’t enjoy most stereotypically feminine things. For me, developing my masculine side was probably more of a survival technique, one that I began in my childhood as a way to protect myself. Like Gawain experienced personally, part of my challenge as an adult has been embracing my feminine side and recognizing that it is not a sign of weakness: The feminine is merely a different type of strength.

It will be a wonderful day when our society can accept the masculine and feminine as different but synchronistic qualities which work together to make our society complete. I look forward to the day when the way women are still treated now is seen as ludicrous as the Skrreean idea that men are too emotional to be involved in leadership. Once the yin and the yang of our lives is more in balance, our society will become totally different than what most of us experience now.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I thank God for my handicaps, for, through them, I have found myself, my work, and my God. ~Helen Keller 

One of the ironies of human life is that some of the most painful things we experience end up being incredible blessings in the long run if we can look at them through the right lens. For me, Lyme has been one of those bitter blessings. Enduring the struggles of late disseminated Lyme disease has been one of the hardest challenges of my life, far worse in ways than going through a divorce, earning a Ph.D. or even having a child die unexpectedly from natural causes. I have been through a very difficult twelve year war with Lyme that has involved being bedbound, homebound, misunderstood, and in hellish physical pain. Yet despite the misery that I have endured because of Lyme, I see it as having been a catalyst for many other incredible blessings in my life.

The stress that Lyme placed on my former less-than-healthy marriage was what dealt the final death blows to the relationship. However, without the influence of the Lyme, I probably would have stayed in a marriage that was less than satisfactory because I was blinded from the reality I was living in. Lyme helped clarify how dysfunctional and unsupportive of a relationship it was and how the relationship wasn't built to sustain those vows of “in sickness and in health.” While the end of the marriage was deeply painful, I am far happier since I separated from my ex-husband than I was in most of the relationship with him. I am very grateful to be able to say that I am happily divorced.

Because I was so sick with Lyme, I was bedbound for the better part of two years and homebound for six. The isolation resulting from the illness has been a huge part of my growth.  As Shakti Gawain writes in Living in the Light:

For me, the severity of the illness I endured forced me to have this time of isolation when I could grow without the overwhelming influence of the external world. While I still had access via the internet, I also spent a great deal of time in silence, and that was crucial to my healing. Now that I have been able to regain health, I am challenged to take my acquired knowledge into the world to help others.

Lyme has also forced me to me evolve spiritually. I would never have walked down the path I am now on if it hadn’t become a vital component for me to regain my health. I would have continued to spend my life, as I did in many previous lives, denying my metaphysical gifts out of fear of rejection and ridicule by those around me and in our society at large. Yet when accepting and using these gifts allowed me to heal when all else had failed, suddenly it no longer mattered what anyone else thought. I needed to be me, and I needed to help others to heal and be themselves, too.

Like any major illness, enduring Lyme for so long showed me what truly matters. I no longer take for granted things like going to the grocery store. I view it as a privilege, not a task. I no longer have an overwhelming need for material objects in my life; whenever I have a burst of health, I tend to use it to clean and purge as I’m still digging my way out from 12 years of accumulated clutter (partially due to living with a packrat and partially due to my inability to do anything besides the basics when I was so sick). I was never an incredibly materialistic person, but now, I’m even less so. Those things that used to bring me happiness no longer seem relevant.

I have also discovered who my true friends and family are. I believe strongly that family is the group of people you turn to both when you want to celebrate and when you want to cry. For many of us, those people aren’t our biological relatives. We create family where we can find it. We adopt families who accept us and love us exactly as we are. I definitely believe this is true for me. I have lost many friends along the way of my journey with Lyme, but I have also gained some new ones who are more amazing than I could have previously imagined.

So does this post mean that you should tell people who are going through some terrible trials that they are blessings in disguise? Absolutely not, unless you want to lose friends or risk life and limb with their reactions! Not everyone is in a space to be able to understand that their trials may eventually turn into blessings. Instead, the best response to people who are undergoing difficult times is simply to tell them that you’re happy to help them in whatever way would best serve them. Until they reach the point that time has helped heal their wounds and allows them to see what they have gained through their pain, the best thing to do is acknowledge their pain and offer loving compassion.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

I have been going through some intense healing lately, so I was in the mood for a miniseries or tv show that would captivate me and keep me horizontal. I found The Moon Embracing the Sun in my Netflix queue and gave it a whirl. While the acting is weak in the pilot, the actors quickly settle into their role and the quality improves rapidly. I began obsessively watching it while I was doing some much needed down time on the couch. This South Korean period drama includes beautiful sets and scenery and amazingly details in the things like the jewelry the women of the court wore. The cast is immense as the king and queen as well as other royals are followed around by all their servants who are as beautiful dressed up as they are (though not as elaborately). There are also a seemingly unnecessary number of feet shots, though it does show of the beautiful embroidery on the characters’ outdoor shoes.

While I tend not to be attracted to Eastern Asian movies, I was drawn to this subtitled series because the misleading Netflix blurb states, “Years after she's assumed dead by the palace, a young noblewoman, now trained as a shaman, returns to court to reclaim her rightful position as queen.” In reality, this statement doesn't even begin to make sense until the sixth episode; shamanism did not have nearly the role I expected in the beginning of the series though by the end it has risen to a crucial plot line. As someone who identifies as a shamanic practitioner and has been a shaman, a witch, a medicine woman, and other types of healers in past lives, I’m always fascinated by seeing shamans and the role they play in other cultures. In the Joseon dynasty, according to this series, shamans were very lowly members of society despite their power. The show gives the impression that the female shamans were far less revered than the male academics in similar fields of astrology and other metaphysical realms probably in large part due to their sex and the lack of power they had in society.  Shamans were not even considered fully human; they also had to register and were forbidden from entering the city without royal consent.

I think a better summary might be, “The fictional royals of a Joseon dynasty explore their duties as they rise to power as well as struggling with the conflicts between their hearts and duties.” The love stories of these characters begins when the young women are 12 and 13 and the young men are 15-17. This is seen as the appropriate time for them to marry. However, as with the European monarchs whom many of us are more familiar with thanks to the biased teaching of “world” history in our schools, marriage for love was often not a possibility. Duty to country was far more important for royals. The very title of the drama refers to the queen (the moon) protecting and serving the king (the sun).

Unlike many Western royal dramas where the men seem unable to keep themselves from having sex with every possible women, getting the royal men in this show to consummate their marriages seems far more difficult than getting pandas to mate. A primary struggle for many episodes occurs as the young king, in an arranged marriage to a woman he does not love, endures heart pains and faints any time he attempts to consummate the marriage. Eight years after the marriage, they both are still virgins. This problem is very much a representation of the mind-body-spirit connection that I so often blog and talk about: When there is something wrong with our emotions and our spirit, our body will get sick. The characters in the show seem vaguely aware of this connection, too.

The series makes frequent use of repetitious flashbacks, especially later in the episodes, to help clarify plot lines. I found these unnecessary and boring, though I can see how they might serve a purpose for someone watching the show as it originally aired over almost half a year rather than binge-watching in a few days’ time. I also did not enjoy a few of the violent scenes at the beginning, middle and end of the series. If you are a highly sensitive person, you may want to fast forward through the initial fight scene, the torture scene, and the dismemberment scene in the first episode. There is another torture scene in episode 14 that is worth forwarding over, and in the final episode, there is a very bloody battle that triggered my finger on the remote as well.

Despite these few drawbacks, I loved The Moon Embracing the Sun. The internet declares that there were two additional specials in addition to the 20 one-hour episodes; I hope that Netflix someday gets these specials available for viewing. The drama was amazing, and I’m missing the characters already as I move off of the couch and back into functioning in the world again.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

When I first entered the online dating world after my separation became official, I was excited by a world of possibility. I thought I’d found a thrilling new adventure. In some ways, I was right. I was fascinated by thewide variety of people who were on the various sites I checked out. I learned all kinds of things that I didn’t realize were true. One of the most shocking for me was discovering that a great number of 40-somethings hadn’t outgrown the lifestyle of going to Sixth Street (Austin’s primary bar district) to get plastered. I erroneously believed that most people outgrew that after college when they got jobs and (for some) their first families. Clearly I was wrong.

For the first month I was on one of the main dating sites, I spent a lot of time surfing profiles. It was only after that first month that I realized what I was actually doing: I was exercising my metaphysical gifts by “reading” these men. I would read a profile on a literal level, and then I would just know, “Hey, this guy has ADHD that he hasn't mentioned.” Then I would read his answers to the multiple choice questions associated with his profile, and lo and behold, I would find where he had declared that he did indeed have ADHD. Over and over again this happened, and what it taught me was that I should trust my instincts about what men weren't declaring in their profiles. My instincts were almost always right to the extent I could prove them.

On a less positive note, I learned that online dating is very much like being back in high school. It’s the skinny, pretty girls who are willing to have sex on one of the first dates who get all the guys’ attention. I stayed away from sites like the one that is superficially based only on someone’s profile picture appearance and instead focused on others which actually allowed me to learn something about the person whose picture I was looking at. Unlike most users, the pictures were the last thing I looked at most of the time. However, most of the people on these sites were still very superficial in their beliefs and behaviors, including the one site for spiritually oriented individuals that I checked out.

I also discovered that fat prejudice is rampant in online dating, moreso than in society at large. When I’m at a restaurant or grocery store, I have no problem getting men to at least talk to me casually about the weather while we wait in line. But online? The rules of the game are very different and very disturbing. Most men have no problem blatantly stating that they find overweight people disgusting and/or they wouldn't consider dating their dream woman if she wasn't a perfect weight.

I am one of those rare women who doesn't have any qualms about messaging guys who looked interesting at least as potential friends and possibly more. Some of the guys on the websites even pleaded for women to message them and promised that they would respond to anyone who sent them a genuine note. The reality was far different than that. I rarely got responses from men. The default acceptable practice in our society has become rudely ignoring messages. When I received a genuine message from a man who wasn't anywhere near what I was looking for, I would send a brief note saying, “I appreciate your message, but I don’t think we have enough in common to start a friendship (or more). Good luck with your search!” However, the vast majority of men just ignored my messages. To me, a comparable reaction would be saying “nice weather” to someone in the line at the grocery store, and the person you were speaking to would make a disgusted face and then turn around so their back was facing you. It’s just plain rude.

All those horror stories and blogs you've read about online dating making women targets for men’s lewd sexual behavior? They’re true, too. Even as one of the less popular women on the sites, I still received messages that were often generic notes sent to any possible woman that the male user could spam. Most of them were pointless one or two word notes that said, “Hey babe.” Others were more sexually explicit. One of my favorites declared, “U r 2 cute.” As a former English teacher and an over-educated woman, I need complete sentences from potential mates. Both one friend and I also thought when we read it, “Too cute for what?” 

Let’s face it: I am a woman who marches to the beat of her own drummer, and I wouldn't have it any other way. I have experienced things in life that most can’t imagine such as being bedbound for two years and homebound for six years. I've given birth to four children and seen one of them die. I graduated from college at 19. I've earned a Ph.D. I talk to dead people for a living. I have a great deal of self-confidence. I don’t wear makeup or subscribe to false societal ideologies about beauty. I am definitely very different, and what I found on dating websites is that different is not good. Rather than making a woman stand out in a positive way, these things scare off most of the men who use these sites.

I've known for quite a while that I wouldn't meet my next major love on a dating site: My spirit guides were quite clear about that. They've given me a general location where I will meet him that could be any one of dozens of places. I remain open to the possibility that might change and I might meet him elsewhere. However, I know that it won’t be on a dating site. Today, I deleted my last account. I am happy to be done with that experimental phase of my life. For a person like me who is very much outside the mainstream in so many ways, online dating is not the way to find emotionally and spiritually healthy men. I’m still perplexed at where all the fabulous middle-aged men are, but I’m certain that one day I will meet my match.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(As always, I am not a medical doctor. This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment. Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

Everyone knows that when you exercise, you might feel tired initially, but all those endorphins you get pumping through your body will help you feel better in the long run. Soon exercising will increase your energy. Right? Wrong! This may be true for the majority of the population, but for those fighting chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS, also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis and systemic exertion intolerance disease) or Lyme disease,* the exact opposite may be true. Exercise has the potential to make these groups of people VERY sick for several days after they attempt to exercise.

This negative response of the body to exercise in the CFS population is known as post-exertional malaise (PEM). Studies have shown that PEM is not an exercise phobia: It is a physical response in those with CFS that does not exist in the healthy but sedentary control populations. While there are contradictory studies regarding fatigue related to CFS, they are problematic in their methodology because they aren’t evaluating patients the day after the testing to follow through: A study by Keller et al has demonstrated how the contradictory studies that aren’t evaluating the correct information on people with CFS and exercise impairment may overestimate the patients’ functionality by 50%. Thus, some patients with CFS can do well on a cardio test, but the next day, they won’t be able to move. Another study by Van Ness et al showed that 85% of the general control population had recovered from testing exercise 24 hours later, but ZERO percent of the CFS population had. That’s a huge difference in the world of statistical validity.

In addition, these studies that have patients doing 15+ minutes of cardio exercise are studies on the best coping patients in the CFS population. These are the people who complain that their CFS limits them to less than eight hours of activity a day as opposed to the people who, like I was previous for two years, are bedbound and unable to do more than take a shower and sit up for an hour daily. The worst of the worst in the CFS population are too sick to even consider participating in studies like these! They are the people who are counting their spoons very carefully, and they can’t spare energy for anything beyond basic bodily needs.

PEM is a hallmark of mitochondrial dysfunction for those in the CFS population. Dr. Amy Myhill was one of the first to develop a protocol to address the role of mitochondria in CFS, a protocol I tried in 2007 or so with limited success. As Myhill describes it:

In short, this means that the body’s batteries can’t get enough juice to power the rest of the body. If your batteries can’t recharge quickly and efficiently, then your ability to function is impaired. Anyone who has had a slow-to-charge cell phone or a laptop battery which couldn't hold a charge for long can get a rough impression of what is going on in a body with mitochondrial dysfunction. It becomes very frustrating and very limiting very quickly.

So how do those with PEM rectify this issue? Aside from protocols like the Myhill one, the best advice is to limit one’s activity on any given day to what one can tolerate. As Myhill phrases it, “Pace - do not use up energy faster than your mitos can supply it.” It’s a simple formula of supply and demand that also involves intuition and listening to one’s body. It also means understanding that while you may be able to walk a mile one day, for the next week you might not be able to walk 50 feet, and then in another week you can walk two miles. It’s an unpredictable roller coaster. I have learned the very hard way that when I start feeling certain pains in my body, I've overdone it, draining my mitochondria almost to their limits, and I need to stop whatever I’m doing immediately or the fallout will be terrible. Pushing myself to expand my limits, like I would have done with exercise when I was healthy, will only have terrible consequences. Thus, when my body says stop, I do it or I pay a very heavy price: I will experience what I call a crash or what many people would call a relapse. This crash will involve extreme fatigue that prevents me from doing anything but laying perfectly still on a horizontal surface while trying to endure the accompanying pain. It’s just not worth having to pay for an activity on the ensuing days. In previous years, my fallout rate would involve days or weeks of being crashed. Since beginning Lyme treatment, instead of paying for days or weeks, the fallout usually lasts no more than 24 hours, but it’s still too high of a price to pay for just a little more physical activity. I still have to strictly obey my body’s limits.

The issue of PEM contributed to the dysfunction in my previous marriage. My ex-husband was the one who had to take over when I crashed, intensely caring both for me and our young children instead of just caring for the children most of the time. Thus, he became incredibly fearful of my crashes and tried to limit my activity. He would tell me, “You can’t do that,” as a statement of fear-based control rather than love-based concern. He could not believe that I could discern when my body was going to crash once I learned to listen to it. Instead, he tried to hold me back from functioning at all rather than having to deal with the aftermath of the crash. While his concerns were understandable, the result was that it was miserable to try and do anything remotely social with him such as a walk in the park on one of my good days because he spent the entire time worrying about what the future might hold rather than enjoying the present moment. Even before we separated, I began avoiding activities with him for this very reason: I didn't want someone along who was going to make the activity miserable and anxiety filled, even if he was doing it from a justifiable place.

Researchers have recognized that post-exertional malaise is so conclusive of a symptom of CFS that it can be used to validly differentiate between the healthy and the CFS populations. However, that acceptance of PEM has not trickled down to most health practitioners or the general population. Most people still blindly believe that exercise is the cure for all that ails you. While exercise has been proven to help those with depression and a wide assortment of other health issues, those with CFS need to be very careful in how they use their limited energy in order not to cause further suffering. If you know people with CFS, please understand that they are not being obstinate or lazy in refusing to push their limits. Rather, they are protecting their own well-being by doing what their bodies tell them is best and that research has supported.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

*I suspect a very large portion of the patients with CFS actually have late disseminated Lyme disease but have not been tested using the proper procedures. This was the case for me as I lived under a CFS diagnosis for six years before being diagnosed with Lyme. CFS and fibromyalgia remain my legal diagnoses because the CDC does not recognize late disseminated Lyme disease.

Remember the “good ol' days?” Yeah. Me neither. Humans as a whole, though, have a bad habit of believing that things were always better in their younger years. It amused me greatly when I was doing dissertation research on 19th century America to read authors bemoan the reckless next generation who were going to destroy everything that was decent about humanity. Almost every generation fears the changes the next brings as they fade out of power; this pattern repeats itself often.

Quite often in popular culture (such as on a local radio show last week), I’ll hear someone talking about, “Well, when I was young, we did [insert specific potentially dangerous action]. It was fine then, so it’s fine for my kids, too.” However, that’s really poor logic. While many of us may have survived the stupid things we did in our youth, other children did not. They’re not here to tell their sides of the story, and they didn't live long enough to have to children to stop them from doing the same thing.

While watching Move Over, Darling (1963, starring Doris Day, James Garner, and Polly Bergen with minor roles by Don Knotts and John Astin) recently on Netflix, I was confronted with one of those situations. As the early scenes of the movie unfold, the young daughters of the lead characters are playing in a pool unsupervised. These girls are between 5.5 and 6 years old based on the timing of them being teething infants when their mother was lost at sea five years prior. In the movie, no one blinks twice about the fact that these girls are playing unattended in a private swimming pool in the back yard, but the modern mother in me had an “aack!” moment over it. 

Clearly social values fifty years ago didn’t see unattended young children in a pool as problematic, and I’m sure it’s one of those things that people said to themselves, “When I was young, we did it without a problem.” However, that’s not true for many others. The American Academy of Pediatrics states that “drowning rates have fallen steadily from 2.68 per 100,000 in 1985 to 1.32 per 100,000 in 2006. But drowning continues to be the second leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 19, claiming the lives of roughly 1,100 children in 2006. Toddlers and teenaged boys are at greatest risk.” The AAP warns against leaving young children unattended by a pool that doesn’t have a sufficient fence around it. While these young girls clearly knew how to swim well, they weren't old enough to be trusted to make good life (or death) decisions at all times.

Examples like this of formerly “safe” practices aren't hard to find. I tried to watch Mad Men recently and utterly failed, giving up after only a few episodes because I was both so bored with and disturbed by the show.  However, in one of the early episodes, two mothers are talking in the kitchen while their kids play elsewhere in the house. The female owner of the house calls for her daughter who shows up with a dry cleaning bag on her head. I’m sure I was not the only who cringed (as the writers wanted us to) when I saw that. However, the mother says nothing to the daughter about suffocation risks and instead warns her that she better not have put the clean dry cleaning on the floor to play with the bag. The obvious parenting priorities: unwrinkled clothing over a child not suffocating! 

In a recent article for The New Yorker, author Tad Friend meets with Matthew Weiner, the creator of Mad Men. Weiner asked Friend what he thought Mad Men was about, to which Friend replied, “Bad parenting.” Weiner replied, “’No. No. That certainly wasn't the focus…. Look, there is definitely some bad parenting in the show, but there’s no drama in good parenting. And plenty of the bad-parenting moments didn’t come from me.’” Yet when I watched the few episodes of the show that I could handle, if you asked me the top five things I thought the show was about, it would have been the huge changes in parenting for the better since the 1960s.

Even in my own lifetime as a child of the 1970s and 1980s, bicycle helmets and seatbelts are two very common changes that have occurred. I never wore a bicycle helmet as a young child; no one I knew did. Seatbelts were something that kids of my generation wore sometimes, maybe. It wasn’t a steadfast rule. I often sat in the front seat as a young child and just put the shoulder strap behind me. My ex-husband’s family didn't even own a car that would safely hold four children: They just shoved the two youngest into the wells on the floor in the backseat. And while one could argue that both my ex-husband and I made it to adulthood, there were many others of our generation who didn't.

The next time you find yourself having a defensive reaction where you say, “Well, when I was young, we did it that way and things turned out fine,” take a moment to decide why you are responding in that way. Was what you did truly safe? How many other children didn’t make it to adulthood because of that practice? Will not engaging in that action make the lives of the next generation less worthwhile? The answers may surprise you when you stop to think about the bigger picture rather than trying to recreate a potentially dangerous part of your childhood for your children.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

(As always, I am not a medical doctor. This information is based on my personal experiences and should not be substituted for medical diagnosis or treatment. Please speak to your health care providers about your personal situation.)

May all who are sick and ill
Quickly be freed from their illness,
And may every disease in the world
Never occur again.
As long as space endures,
As long as there are being to be found,
May I continue likewise to remain
To soothe the sufferings of those who live.
~The Dalai Lama

For many people, pain is pain. They have been blessed never to experience the amazingly wide variety of pain that the human body can endure. In the case of many women, natural childbirth or recovering from a c-section is their gauge of the highest level of pain they can imagine. For men, there isn't quite the same standard of comparison. I have heard many people of different sexes say that passing kidney stones was the worst pain of their life; for others, the pain of shingles is the ultimate misery.  Having endured shingles in my neck and having successfully completed natural childbirth many times, I would say that shingles were worse than my second and third labors for the births of my second thru fourth children. My first labor and birth, however, were far worse than any of them.

Yet when it comes to late disseminated Lyme disease, the levels of pain I have experienced are nowhere near the levels of pain in these other comparisons. In part, that is due to the unrelenting nature of Lyme pain. Childbirth labor will end within 24-48 hours in our modern culture. C-section recovery time is 2-6 weeks in many cases. But for Lyme, there is no definite time table. It just goes on and on. I tell many people that if I were able to put their spirits into my body, they would immediately pass out from the level of constant and unrelenting physical pain I live with. I have built up a tolerance to the pain, and I have learned how to function somewhat well with it. Most people, though, simply don’t have that tolerance. Yet no matter how long I have lived with it, the pain is still miserable. It doesn't make it any better just because you’re used to it. 

Despite the fact that I am a holistic life coach and intuitive energy healer who focuses on helping others heal through natural solutions, I frequently have people tell me how they cured their non-Lyme pain naturally. Based on their limited experience, they feel I should be doing what they did and I will magically be healed. They talk about how turmeric did amazing things for their pain or how other natural anti-inflammatories were miracle workers. However, that level of relief is not appropriate for Lyme pain. A comparable comparison would be like telling someone with a compound bone fracture that s/he/ze should just put a bandage on it, and everything will feel so much better. In that case, the person needs a skilled surgeon or doctor to put his/her/hir bone back into the body, to seal the broken skin, to apply a cast of some sort, and to monitor for infection or complications. The situation is far too complicated to just use a bandage. Likewise, no one in their right minds would tell women who are in labor or just had c-sections that the only methods of pain relief they should use is turmeric. Even if a woman is attempting natural childbirth, she will be using other pain relief techniques such as walking, acupressure, hypnosis, meditation, breathing, massage, and more in order to manage the pain of labor.

That’s not to say that natural pain relief methods aren't helpful. I do take fish oil, a natural anti-inflammatory, and get some relief from it. I’m pretty sure that if one sliced open my veins, they would be dyed the beautiful yellow-orange color of turmeric from how much I have taken it over the years. I use other herbal formulas to help lessen the pain by addressing other issues besides inflammation that cause pain for me. Yet alone, the natural methods are like putting a shovelful of dirt into a grave: It’s nowhere enough to fill the hole. Even in combination, these methods can’t get the pit even half full.

Why is Lyme pain so bad? That’s a million dollar question, and the researcher who is able to understand and cure it will win a special place in heaven if I had anything to do with it!  Lyme creates pain on many different levels: On any given day, I am dealing with muscle, bone, joint, ligament, organ, and neural pain. Each feels very different, and each requires different approaches for relief. But why is there all of this pain, especially when one is going through treatment for Lyme? The best analogy is a comparison to a bee sting.  When a bee stings a human, it releases a toxic venom into the human’s body which makes the human miserable, fatally so in cases of extreme allergy. In other cases, the bee toxin “just” creates severe inflammation, itching and pain. Regardless, it’s a successful evolutionary method of teaching predators like humans to stay away from bees lest they have to face the consequences of a sting.

Likewise, Lyme has evolved into an amazingly sophisticated bacteria, far moreso than most bacteria we are used to dealing with. The way it adapts and impairs the human body is mind-boggling to me.  One of these protective features of the evolved Lyme bacteria is that when it dies, it releases toxins into the body of its human host causing extreme pain. The Lyme doesn't want to die; thus, it tries to make it difficult and undesirable for the human host to kill it.  Survival of the fittest reigns again. Many patients who have fought late disseminated Lyme will tell you that the cure is almost worse than the disease when it comes to Lyme because of the extreme pain that happens during the process of Lyme die off, also known as a Herxheimer reaction or herxing.

So what can one do for Lyme pain? There’s a variety of approaches to take, and many people find they need more than one. Like I mentioned above, fish oil, turmeric, and other anti-inflammatories can be useful in contributing to the overall picture, but they will not be enough on their own for most people.  A strict diet is absolutely necessary: Sugar, refined foods, gluten, and other items can make the pain much, much worse. There are other herbs and natural substances that can also help bind to and absorb some of the toxins that the Lyme releases as it dies including chlorella and l-ornithine.  Because the buildup of these toxins in one’s system can create even more pain, it’s important to make sure that detoxification and elimination processes in the body are working well. This includes taking herbal and vitamin liver and kidney support, having frequent bowel movements, drinking lots of water and sweating such as in a FIR sauna. Massage, manual lymph drainage, chiropractic, and acupuncture as well as other bodywork modalities can also greatly facilitate the detoxification process.

The neuropathic pain I suffer from is also an indirect result of the Lyme die off. When many people are sick, their blood sugar levels will rise as part of the hormonal process that is helping them heal. When blood sugar levels get high enough for long enough, such as during a chronic illness, they can cause neuropathic pain that is hellish in ways that can’t be expressed in words. The burning and tingling sensation of my entire skin surface hurting is unlike any other; it makes me want to peel off all my skin with a potato peeler because that sounds less painful.

The obvious solution to this is to keep one’s blood sugar low through strict diet and herbs.  Despite devout adherence these methods, my body is stubbornly unwilling to lower my blood sugar levels; this is not uncommon among patients with Lyme. Since I am consistently short of being diabetic by lab testing because of a rigorous diet, my doctors cannot prescribe insulin to control my blood sugar; one of the other most popular blood sugar drugs for those who are pre-diabetic sent me into lactic acidosis, an uncommon but known side effect. (I’m not in the high risk group for it happening, either!) While I absolute detest medicating symptoms rather than dealing with the actual cause, the neuropathy I endure is one situation where the only realistic option has come down to medicating the symptom of pain rather than curing the actual problem in order to get through the pain of the battle in order to win the war. It’s a quandary because killing Lyme is raising my blood sugar, but in order to get rid of the Lyme to lower my blood sugar, we have to kill it. There’s no easy solution on this one. So in order to get me through the process of the Lyme dying, we have to mask the miserable side effects with drugs.

For someone who lives a very holistic life and does not partake in alcohol or recreational drugs, I am unbelievably grateful that there are western drugs to provide pain relief when all of the above is not enough. I have only met one person with severe late disseminated Lyme Disease who did not have to take narcotics at some point to get through the pain; it was a matter of principle for him and he chose to be in hellish pain rather than take the drugs. Most who have walked this path, though, will have no judgment of others who turn to high power drugs to help during the most painful parts of the journey.

I think many in the natural healing community, both patients and practitioners, forget that Western medicine does have a place of importance in our lives. While diet is crucial to successful management of diabetes, those who have diabetes, especially those with Type 1, rely on insulin to survive. Up until insulin was understood and used to help those with diabetes in the 1920s (winning a Nobel Prize), being diagnosed with diabetes was a death sentence. Likewise, I had a great aunt who died as a toddler early in the last century from “lockjaw” which we now know as tetanus. It’s a bacterial infection that can now be prevented through vaccination or in milder cases, treated with antibiotics after infection. These are health conditions that require Western intervention; most people don’t deny that.  What most people haven’t accepted is that late disseminated Lyme is a condition that also requires complicated treatments that involve both holistic and Western medicine.

Lyme pain is truly different than most other pain we experience as humans. It’s a pain that I hope that most people never have to endure. I also hope and pray that someday there will be better solutions for killing Lyme without creating so much pain as part of the cure.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

About two months ago, it was rather frigid in Austin at a mere 36F. I was curled up on the couch with a quilt and a good book, but I wanted some silent music in the background. Being too comfortable (and admittedly too lazy) to get up and turn on the stereo, I decided to turn on a selection on Netflix that I’d previously seen my daughter watching. "Fireplace for Your Home" is exactly what it sounds like: Thirty minutes of a crackling fireplace. Episode two has no music, though episode one has Christmas songs heavy on a synthesizer and episode three has instrumental music. Also in the series are "Fireplace for Your Home: Cascade Mountain Stream" (30 minutes) and "Fireplace for Your Home: Winter Wonderland for Your Home" (56 minutes). The “Winter Wonderland” episode has a large variety of rotating photos while the “Cascade Mountain Stream” is just one beautiful and tranquil view.

I settled on episode two so that I would have background noise as I read. Since my asthma prevents me from being around fires, we don’t have fires in my home, but at previous points in my life, I loved watching real fireplace fires. Despite my intention not to watch this mindless distraction, I was lured from my book as an impromptu meditation began for me by watching the fire burning on my television screen. I focused on my core of my body and was given the image of my chakras being cleansed by fire. The fireplace and grill in the film became symbolic of the support I have around me as I work to heal myself from physical and spiritual wounds. I found the blackness of the smoke on the fireplace stones to be powerful and beautiful, not dark at all in a negative sense. That blackness was part of the purification and release of pain.

Continuing to watch the film, the grill holding the fire reminded me of my childhood when my family would burn fires and when I could still sit and watch them in real life since my asthma was not as severe then. I let my vision drift to different areas of the screen, watching and absorbing all the different things happening in the fire. White ash was beginning to form, and yet a deep internal glow continued in the logs. To me, this was representing the deep strength and beauty within each of us even as our bodies became tarnished with age. I began to feel the warm of the fire surrounding me, and I contemplated how the fire of our lives also spreads and glows. The flames on the tv screen were flaring up periodically in an unexpected fashion. This reminded me of how our lives often shift without us expecting them to. The popping of the fire reminded me of the noise that often comes along in our lives to distract us from our higher soul’s goals. The wood eventually began to break apart as it weakened from the flames; this reminded me of the concept of soul fractures, when traumas in our lives can cause deep rifts in our soul. The demise of the wood also led me to reflect on our own mortality and decomposition of our body. As the flames began to go dark at the end of the film, it seemed appropriately symbolic to me of how many of our lives fade out at the end.

Almost anything can become a meditation, and sometimes the unplanned meditations within our lives can be the most powerful. What I thought was going to be background noise ended up being a beautiful experience reflecting on the change in our lives as we approach death.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC

Many months ago I watched the Japanese film Departures (2008, PG-13) on Netflix. I thought I had reviewed it then, but apparently I did not. Almost four months later, this movie still haunts my thoughts. It is one of the more powerful films I have seen because of its comparative perspectives on modern society’s avoidance of death.

In Departures, Daigo Kobayashi is a young violinist who has finally become a member of a professional orchestra only to have the orchestra fold due to financial problems shortly after his success. Faced with no income, Daigo and his wife Mika Kobayashi move back to the small town where he grew up; they have a rent-free home there which was left to him by his mother when she died several years previously. In search of a source of income, Daigo answers an advertisement for a job working with “departures” thinking that the job is in travel. Much to his dismay, he discovers that the work is actually ritually preparing bodies for cremation or burial. As he is apprenticed to Ikuei Sasaki, Daigo enters the death sights of many people and performs this preparation ritual of washing and dressing the body while the family watches and prays.

To those of us in the West, this doesn't seem to be a big deal. It appears to be a different way of approaching death than our culture does: All burial preparation is done by funeral homes in our modern world. We have completely sterilized death and taken it out of the home as much as possible. However, in Japan, this ritual is still seen as an important part of preparing a body for the afterlife. It’s an act of love and devotion. Despite this importance, the men who act as the preparers are seen as unclean and having lowly careers. Daigo's wife actually leaves him because he refuses to give up his work in this new chosen field once he accepts that it is his vocation, his true calling in life.

I found Departures fascinating in how demonstrated a different modern culture’s approach to death, yet at the same time, it made me reexamine how our society handles (or more accurately, doesn't handle) death. While hospice care is making it far more common for members of our society to die at home when previous generations would only have died in hospitals (until history gets far enough back that dying was still at home), death is still a very taboo topic in American society. Morticians and funeral directors are still eyed with same skepticism at best. Often they are depicted as swindlers taking advantage of individuals in their hour of need. However, from my experience with my daughter’s death, I have to say that the funeral home director we worked with was one of the most honest and compassionate people we encountered during our trials. Thirty plus years after the death of his own infant daughter, he understood our pain in a way most people did not.

Most people don’t want to talk about death out of fear. It’s the great unknown for many. Our society acts as it often does when broached by something it fears: Ignoring anything that causes pain. Yet this approach is very unhealthy. We all will die. It’s one of those guarantees in life along with taxes. We will all know people whom we love who will die. Grief is an emotion we will have to face. And if we choose not to face these major emotions resulting from the deaths of those we love, we will create toxic wells of unvented emotion in our body, ones that can eventually cause physical suffering.

Overall, this is a movie about compassion as much as it is about death. Daigo must learn how to act from a different place than he ever has. Ikuei Sasaki’s tutelage helps him to come to terms with death and the rituals around it; this includes learning to forgive his own father who abandoned him many years ago when he was a child. Departures is a powerful movie, one of the best I've seen in many years. It’s one I’d like to watch again sometime because I feel I probably missed so much the first time around.

© 2015 Elizabeth Galen, Ph.D., Green Heart Guidance, LLC