When one struggles with major health issues, especially ones that have been as life changing as the ones I have faced courtesy of late disseminated Lyme disease, one learns to find the bitter blessings in places that one never would have previously found them. When faced with struggles and challenges, the silver lining almost always seems to be present if you can set your mind to find it. It’s that ability to see the “little” things that can make it possible to accomplish what seem like insurmountable difficulties on a daily basis. Those challenges include simple outings that most wouldn’t see as a big deal at all.

Earlier this week, my Bachelor/ette watching buddy in New York and I were alerted to a book signing with Chris Harrison, the host and one of the producers of the show, from our favorite blog on the show. The Barnes and Noble bookstore in Austin at which it was being held is only ten minutes from my house. As we messaged back and forth, my friend helped me get the enthusiasm to face the possibly insurmountable challenge of attending Wednesday night. Quite honestly, if the treatment I am undergoing right now hadn’t hit a breakthrough point on Monday, I couldn’t have gone; last week it would have been impossible. Next week it might be impossible again, but on Wednesday at around 5 pm, I realized my health was actually going to allow me to do this.

However, I’ve had false starts with many events in the past. I don’t get my hopes up until I am actually engaged in the event. I know all too well that it could all fall apart before I get there due to health-based logistical complications. Furthermore, I haven’t attended an indoor event with a large crowd of random people in a chemically saturated environment since 2004. That’s 11 years. The last time I walked in a bookstore was also probably in 2004. While I’ve been able to do much more over the past two years than I previously could, especially than in the six years that I was homebound and the two that I was almost bedbound, I still had no idea if my body was going to be able to handle it. I was worried about parking (because anyone who lives in north Austin can tell you that the parking lot at the Arboretum is weird and often overcrowded). I was concerned about too large of a fragrant crowd wearing perfumes that my body can’t tolerate, and I worried about the store itself being more than my chemical sensitivities could handle. As a result, I took my grocery list with me since Whole Foods is only a few blocks away. Then, if I had to leave without attending the book signing, I would not feel like the effort of getting dressed and heading out was a complete loss. I’ve learned from past events that this is one of the things I need to do to find a silver lining when an event falls through for me.

When I arrived at the parking lot, all of the five or six disabled spots were taken, but someone walked up to his car in one of them as I pulled up. I offered gratitude to whatever higher powers gave me the closest possible parking spot and headed in hoping that was a sign of good things to come. It was. I was able to tell from the parking lot and the noise level when I walked in the store that the crowd was not huge; at that point it was probably only 50 people though by the end of the night it was likely closer to 125. Feeling confident, I bought a copy of The Perfect Letter, and then headed to the second floor area where the signing was taking place. Here I met the first challenge of the evening: The escalators to the second floor were either broken or turned off. So I was left with a choice: Either walk to the far end of the store where the elevator is and then traverse back to the gathering area, or climb the escalators manually. Which was least taxing on my body? Since my knees weren’t in bad shape last night, I opted for climbing the escalator which my body handled.

Upon reaching the second floor balcony area, I faced the next major challenge: There were no more available chairs. It was already standing room only with about ten people mulling around. Given the pain and issues in my lower half of my body right now, standing right now for more than about five minutes is a physical impossibility for me. I approached an employee, let her know that I am disabled, and verified that it was ok to just sit on the floor. I’ve been at other events at other locations in the distant past where employees get very snippity about fire marshall rules and not sitting: SRO means literally standing. However, this employee didn’t seem to care, so I sat next to a bookcase where I could get partial back support. In retrospect, I wish I’d brought my backjack, but it’s a lesson learned for similar future events I might attend. At past points in my life, I would have been very self-conscious about the fact that I was the only person sitting on the floor, but after so many years of bodily limitation, I’ve learned to do what I need for my body and ignore any judgment, verbal or nonverbal, that comes my way.

After Chris Harrison spoke for an hour, the area was rearranged for the actual book signing which was done in order of wristband grouping. I was somewhere in the middle of the crowd, but there was no way I could stand in the line to wait. I approached the employee who was the gatekeeper for things, let her know my situation, and asked if I could go sit in a chair until it was my turn. She was quite friendly and willing to accommodate; I know she’d seen me sitting on the floor through the earlier part of the event. When my group got to the front of the line, I let her know that I was willing to wait until the end of that group if she would just call me up when it was my turn. Most mercifully, she immediately plopped me at the front of the line at that point since I’m guessing my face was starting to show my pain and fatigue levels at that point. I got my photo (above) and my book signed and headed out, walking back down the escalators.

The recovery process began when I got to my car as I had to just sit there for a few minutes and let my body decompress from the work it had just done for me. Once I got home, I began doing the things I have to do to support my liver in detoxification to ensure that I wouldn’t get a migraine or a fibromyalgia flare from the event.  By the time I headed to bed two hours later, my body was very cranky about what I had put it through, though after an hour of in ice pack on the worst pain, I was able to fall asleep. The next morning my body was very sore, but I can’t tell how much of the pain I have was from the event and how much was from the therapeutic treatments I had on Wednesday morning.

So after all that, was it worth it? Absolutely. I picked a great speaker for my return to book events. It’s not always the case that someone who is a good author or a great tv star makes an equally entertaining public speaker, but in this case, Chris Harrison is just as successful in front of a crowd as he is in front of the camera. I never know how much other people perceive of what I pick up on, but to me, it seemed as though Harrison was actually a bit nervous for the first few minutes as he began talking. By the time he switched to the question and answer part of the evening, Harrison was totally in his element. The fabulous sense of humor that we see glimpses of on The Bachelor/ette came through loud and clear as he talked extemporaneously on whatever topics the crowd quizzed him on. Harrison also maintains a grounded sense about him despite the circles he travels in. When he discusses people such as Matthew McConaughey or Nicholas Sparks, he isn’t dropping names or showing off. He’s just talking about the guys he’s spent some time with.

The evening was filled with a great deal of laughter, and I felt like I came away from it with a better understanding of the behind the scenes efforts that go into making The Bachelor/ette. I would have loved to engage with Harrison about a few of the issues I have with the show, but given that I was on the floor in the back and that I know my questions aren’t the typical ones, I just chose to enjoy others’ questions instead. I was thoroughly engaged for the entire evening. If I’d had to pay an admission price beyond the optional buying of a book, it would have still been worth it. An evening with Chris Harrison makes for fabulous entertainment!

Part of why I enjoy The Bachelor/ette so much is because of the allure of the travel. The idea of international or even domestic travel is still a fantasy in my life, so watching others enjoy their travels gives me hope for when I am able to travel as well. Even though attending this book signing might seem like a small step toward travel to most, my closest friends recognize what a huge step forward it was for me in the long journey of my recovery. As part of that slow movement forward, I find great pleasure in rediscovering the world around me that I haven’t been able to engage with for so long. I would bet money that I was the only one at the book signing who found incredible awe and pleasure in the setting. Seeing so many books on the shelves was a truly amazing sight for me, almost as though I had never walked in a bookstore before. I am so grateful for this illness-induced perspective on life that lets me find the wonder in things that most people wouldn’t think twice about. This awe for our society and the world around us is one of the things I hope that I carry away from living with chronic illness and keep with me for the rest of my life.

UPDATE 5/28/15: I sent this post to the manager at this location of Barnes and Noble who was in charge of the event. He responded quickly and politely, apologizing for the first bookseller who did not follow the proper procedure for helping the disabled; he will be addressing the issue with her so that she is fully informed for future events. He let me know that there are always additional seats held back for situations like mine so that I should not have needed to sit on the floor. He also explained that the store has wheelchairs available for helping to get customers to the second floor area, a courtesy I would not have expected. Finally, he said that the escalators are always turned off for events like this because of noise issues but that they are easily turned on and off at a moment's notice for a situation like mine. I appreciate all of this information so that any future experiences I have at that store will be much more accessible for me.

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

In our world, the default standards are often based on the male perspective being the norm. Women and their bodies are somehow expected to conform to ideals that are biologically impossible. One great example of this can be found in the all too common process of peeing in a cup. I would venture to guess that women’s urine gets analyzed far more often than men’s because women are eight times more likely than men to get a urinary tract infection (UTI), and it’s rare for a man under the age of fifty to experience a UTI. In addition, women have their urine checked at every maternity appointment. I’d guess I had my urine tested at least ten times in each pregnancy. My ex-husband had to be drug tested before each new job he took, but aside from that, I don’t think he’s had other urine testing done on him more than a few other times in his entire life. That total is less than the number of times I was tested in just one pregnancy, and I’ve had three pregnancies!

Despite the fact that many women have to pee in a cup regularly for testing, the standard design of a urinalysis cup is not ideal for women. It’s designed for men whose penises can easily be directed into the cup with little to no mess. For women who sit while they pee, the process is not as easy. Trying to aim into something you can’t see and which isn’t wide enough to catch a stream that may flow in any direction depending upon the exact angle of the woman’s body is very difficult. Furthermore, for an obese woman, her arms aren’t quite long enough. Trying to hold the cup beneath one’s urethra is a physical struggle that contributes to the mess.

It seems like someone should have solved this problem long ago. While someone did design the Go-Girl for women to use in situations such as road trips to allow women to easily pee while standing up, it seems like there has to be a better solution for giving urine samples. Holding the patent for whatever device gets designed has to be a million dollar idea. So with all the useless innovations that have flooded the market, why is there still no easy, clean,affordable, and sanitary solution to assist women in easily giving a urine sample? I look forward to the day when peeing in a cup is a simple process rather than a body-bending challenge for women!

(For those who are ever attentive to detail, that is actually a stool specimen container pictured above. I didn't have a slightly larger urine one available to photograph.)

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

When my ex-husband’s grandmother was in her late 80s, her health began to fail. She complained bitterly to me on one visit that she had to take TWO pills every day. TWO!!! For her, this was an unimaginable travesty. Given that I had to take two allergy pills daily at the age of 20, I was less than impressed by this horrific fate she was dealing with. However, it was a matter of perspective. She’d been in excellent health all of her life, but now she was facing decline. Two pills was symbolic of the end to her.

For those who deal with chronic illness, the idea of only taking two pills a day is a funny joke. Taking that few pills is no different than brushing one’s teeth: It's just a basic part of daily life. Right now, I take 13+ Western medical drug capsules per day. Then there are the supplements. Unlike Western drugs which are chemically based and therefore often quite small in size, herbal supplements are not compact. They often require multiple pills per supplement daily in order to get the necessary dose. I don’t even keep track of the total number of pills anymore, but it’s in the dozens per day. Whenever I see new practitioners, they look at my list of supplements and immediately declare, “You are taking too many things.” However, once we review the list and I tell them what each supplement is for and what side effects I have when I stop it, they agree that I shouldn't mess with the system I have going which helps keep my body relatively stable and decreases my pain levels.

Managing all of those supplements requires a system of organization that most individuals with health issues work out after a while. Opening a dozen bottles at every meal each day gets tedious. The typical pill keepers on the market are meant for someone taking only a few small Western drugs per day. They’re pretty pointless for someone using large numbers of herbal supplements. Early in my illness, a fellow patient showed me her technique for managing pills: An organizer she found at the hardware store for sorting nuts, bolts, and nails. I picked a similar plastic box organizer (pictured above), and it has become vital to my supplement management. These can be found at craft stores, organizer stores, hardware stores, and superstores. My supplement doses change regularly, so I prefer not to mete out more than five days at a time lest I have to redo them. On every fifth day, though, I sit down and listen to music for 15 minutes while I fill my supplement box. As I fill the box, I try to integrate mindfulness meditation into the process: I remember consciously what each supplement is for, and I ask for help in achieving its goal.

Keeping track of the doses of each supplement is also a task when one’s mind is filled with brain fog. My practitioners taught me to write the dose on the lid or label using a permanent marker. However, for those with chemical sensitivities, it’s often difficult to tolerate the chemicals in markers. An alternate solution is to write the dose on self-adhesive labels and stick them on the lid or bottle. I also keep an up-to-date list of supplements on my computer with doses so that whenever I see a new practitioner, I can simply print out my list of supplements and say “see attached” rather than trying to remember and cram everything onto two small lines on an application form. 

Chronic illness affects every aspect of a person’s life. Taking supplements becomes an integral part of life, one that can often seem like a burden. Finding ways to make the process a little easier can help relieve some of the resentment one feels about needing assistance in order to be semi-functional.

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

God hath given you one face, and you make yourselves another. ~Hamlet in Hamlet by William Shakespeare

Old age is the verdict of life. ~Amelia Barr

A recent ad on Pinterest reads, “Fast fix for gray hair.” This simple statement implies that gray hair is broken or wrong in some way and needs to be fixed, yet gray hair is natural. In men, it’s often a sign of distinguishment and age, but for women, it’s a problem to be fixed. Why does our society promote this double standard between the sexes? I certainly don’t have the answer, but I know the societal problem is real and extremely widespread.

I got my first gray hair when I was pregnant with my youngest at age 28. I was standing in the master bathroom when I spied it in the mirror. My then-husband walked in the room, and I asked him, “Is that a gray hair?” He looked carefully, and then walked back out of the bathroom without saying a word. That gave me my answer! I talked about it with my midwife and her intern at my next visit. They confirmed for me that yes, it was a gray hair. The midwife asked me when my mother got her first gray hair. I had no idea. I told her that my mother dyed her hair with the awful-smelling toxic ammonia-based hair colors for as long as I could remember. My midwife pointed out that that was my answer as to when she first started going gray.

Twelve years later, I have a lot more than just one gray hair. My photos don’t often show the gray as it still blends well, but in person, there’s no missing it. My chemical sensitivities prevent me from dyeing my hair because even the natural dyes often contain less than tolerable ingredients for the chemical sensitive. I’m sure I’d look ridiculous with henna, too. But the bottom line isn’t that I can’t dye my hair: It’s that I don’t want to. My gray hairs are part of whom I am. They’re a mark of age. They show that I’m human. I’ve earned every one of those gray hairs, and I don’t want to get rid of them even if I could dump chemicals on my head.

Society isn’t as kind about gray hairs. I only have a few friends who don’t think that dyeing their hair is mandatory. They don’t want to look older than they are. These normally green living women aren't willing to face the way they look. They bow to society’s pressure to try to look younger than they really are. In the dating market especially, looking older is not considered a benefit for a middle-aged woman. Even though some of these friends are financially strapped, they still find the money for touch ups every three weeks along with regular coloring sessions. It’s not something they consider optional or a luxury.

I think a lot of the fear behind gray hairs eventually trickles down to a fear of dying. The older we get, we get closer to death at least according to a statistical perspective. For me, worrying about death seems kind of pointless. It’s going to happen whether we want it to or not. Rather than worrying about dying, I’d rather focus on living. Now that I’m almost 41, living with gray hairs doesn’t seem like a bad thing. Instead, it seems to be a privilege, a symbol of survival. One of my most recent past lives ended at the age of 23 or so, though I managed to pack a lot of living into those years. However, given the option, a few gray hairs don’t seem like that high of a price for a longer life!

When our society as a whole stops seeing gray hairs as something to be fixed, a lot will change. We will begin accepting ourselves and each other for who we actually are. Superficial things like hair color will no longer matter as we pick mates or apply for jobs. I'm not sure which will be the cause and which will be the effect in terms of gray hairs being seen normal and greater acceptance at large, but I look forward to a day when our culture has evolved enough to accept people exactly as they are, beautiful in their own ways.

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

Recently, the notification of the suicide by a patient with Lyme came across on a Lyme group I’m a member of. Unfortunately, this is not a rare occurrence. Lyme may not kill directly the way a disease like cancer does, but the hell it causes for the patients and their families makes suicide a common form of death for Lyme patients. Early in my battle with Lyme, I read this speech made by Joseph G. Jemsek, MD, FACP, AAHIVS made before the North Carolina Medical Board on July 20, 2006. It became deeply seared into my brain, and I have unfortunately found out firsthand how true it is:

I was in high school when HIV and AIDS were finally starting to be understood. One of my youth group leaders said to us at one point, “You kids don’t understand how big of a deal AIDS is going to be.” (We’ve all suspected that he died from AIDS-related cancer a few years after that, but for religious reasons, his true medical history was not given to the public.) AIDS was the most terrible disease anyone could imagine at that point. Yet only 20 years later with the rapid innovations in HIV treatment, a doctor who works with both HIV/AIDS and Lyme patients clearly states that the Lyme patients are the ones with the inferior quality of life.

Unfortunately, suicide is not uncommon among those with Lyme because the quality of life that Lyme and accompanying tick-borne diseases leave people with is so low. There are a variety of reasons that can lead to patients taking their own lives. First and foremost, Lyme causes horrible physical pain that leaves them living in a hellish existence. Many have difficulties finding doctors to prescribe adequate pain relief as they’re seen as drug seekers and/or because of restrictions due to the “war on drugs.” For many pain doctors who don’t understand late disseminated or chronic Lyme disease, they can’t tell nor do they believe how bad the pain really is.

Getting treatment for Lyme disease itself is also difficult due to medical politics around Lyme disease. The nearest medical practitioner to Austin who openly treats Lyme is in a suburb outside Dallas; the second nearest doctor is in Louisiana and is over a six hour drive away. (There are others who practice covertly within Texas, but one won't find them on an internet search.) When I was first diagnosed with Lyme, my chemical sensitivities were too severe for me to be able to travel out of Austin to find treatment which greatly limited my options. For others, their difficult financial situations prevent travel and seeing doctors who are out-of-network. Many years ago, there was a nurse practitioner who used to openly treat Lyme in Austin, but she now practices in Washington, D.C. due to Texas Medical Board politics. Both the doctors who treat Lyme and the patients with Lyme suffer greatly due to these political issues when treatment is difficult to administer and receive.

The fatigue that accompanies Lyme is debilitating for many. At the worst of the illness, I wanted to end my marriage, but I could not because I literally could not take care of myself. I required a caregiver to buy me food and prepare it for me quite often. I couldn’t drive myself to the doctor. I couldn’t walk to the mailbox to get my Netflix discs (before the days of streaming) to keep me entertained. If I’d left my husband, I would have lost custody of my children because I couldn't have taken care of them in any meaningful way. Without my children, I would have lost everything that was important to me at that point and I would have had no reason to keep living.

Many Lyme patients are put on drug such as antipsychotics and antidepressants which carry suicide risk warnings. When I first began having severe Lyme related symptoms, my caring but misguided primary care provider decided I was suffering from postpartum depression and tried to convince me I needed an antidepressant. That is a fairly typical for most people who are dealing with the overwhelming symptoms of Lyme: Their doctors decide that this bizarre and long list of symptoms they are reporting must all be in their heads. Rather than pursuing testing and realistic solutions, the patients are put on drugs that have a potential to do more harm than good. The antidepressant that most doctors chose as a first line of defense is one that subsequent genetic testing has shown that my body cannot detoxify. Thus, taking that drug could have made me very ill or even suicidal.

Lyme can also cause mineral imbalances that cause emotional instability: I've experienced this personally when a sudden zinc deficiency cause a severe round of depression and crying. Imbalances in brain chemistry can happen with Lyme patients as well. Unfortunately, most practitioners aren't looking to find these simple-to-treat causes of depression and so patients don’t get the supplements they need to remain stable. 

Likewise, the extreme lack of quality sleep that can accompany Lyme disease can lead to suicidal thoughts. During the worst years of the Lyme battle, I was only getting one hour stretches of sleep even though I was sleeping 12-16 hours a day. Continuous sleep deprivation can destroy one’s body and mind, creating all kinds of dysfunction. There's a good reason sleep deprivation is used as a form of torture.

Soon after I was diagnosed with Lyme, a friend with Lyme warned me of a severe depression that can accompany Lyme dying off. Another patient with Lyme also talked to me about it at a later date. The toxins released during a Lyme die off create a depression which makes the entire universe seem blacker than black. It is dark and awful; it defies description in ways that are unspeakable because of how horrid it is. It in no way resembles situational depression or minor depression that most of us have experienced at some point in our lives. During the Lyme induced depression, nothing in one's thoughts is accurate. I always knew that the hellish blackness would only last 48-72 hours, but there were times when I wasn't sure I would be able to make it through those few days of complete darkness.

It's not uncommon for friends and family to disappear into the woodwork over the course of a patient's Lyme struggles. When I first began having symptoms and had no diagnosis, many of my friends and family members didn't understand. Some did things that were physically harmful to me even though my ex-husband and I asked them to stop: They thought my chemical sensitivities were just delusions. Others thought the whole thing was delusional because surely no one could have as many symptoms as I was having and still have a normal CBC. They also falsely assumed that doctors can easily diagnose everything in this modern day. One of the default responses of people is that when they don't know what to do or don't know how to cope, they abandon the person in need. This happens all too often to Lyme patients who after years of suffering find themselves down to only a core group of friends who really care, and in some cases, they might not even have that.

Financial ruin is not unusual for those with late disseminated Lyme disease. I was blessed to be married to a man who earns a very successful salary. He was able to keep supporting me when I was no longer contributing to the family economy. His job provided decent health insurance, and while it doesn’t cover anywhere near half of my medical expenses, it does still pay on some of them. I applied for and upon appeal received SSDI, but the cost of my Lyme-related treatment has been over twice what I receive from SSDI in most years, and that doesn't even include needing money to pay a mortgage or eating or any of those other pesky living experiences. Were it not for my ex-husband, I would not have been able to afford the treatments that got me well. Healthcare and wellness are still a privilege of the wealthy in this nation, not a universal right.

When watching an ILADS conference video a few years, one of the keynote speakers, a doctor who was one of the best known in the field, told those attending something similar to the following: “If your patients didn’t have PTSD before they got Lyme, they will have it by the time they reach your office. They will have spent years and thousands of dollars going to doctors who don’t believe them and who can’t help them despite the fact that they have very real health problems.” The emotional distress of PTSD from health-related problems cannot be undervalued: It alone is enough to cause depression and suicidal idealization. This doesn't have to be, though, and it shouldn't be. If doctors were educated on Lyme treatment and insurance companies were willing to pay for it, the quality of the lives of patients with Lyme would increase rapidly. Instead, however, many Lyme patients are left broken, broke, and alone at the end of their battle. Is it any wonder that they choose suicide over a life of continuing struggle and pain?

© 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.

(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

(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.)

I use both mainstream Western and complementary medicine. Both have areas in which they are superior. For cases of violent physical trauma and of extreme physical pain relief, Western medicine has complementary medicine beat without question. In most other cases, I prefer to start my healing with complementary medicine.

One of my major issues with Western medicine is that most doctors are looking to provide symptom relief. If you have high cholesterol, they want to medicate the symptom rather than finding the source of the elevation. Diet changes may be suggested, but often there are other issues at hand that are ignored. If you are depressed, the Western doctors want to give a pill rather than looking at what might be causing the depression. If your thyroid is low functioning, they only want to put you on a thyroid medication rather than asking what is causing the thyroid to malfunction. In contrast, complementary medicine often (but not always) looks to find the underlying cause behind the pain and treat that. It’s about looking for the root of the issue to eliminate it long term rather than just finding immediate relief.

I see so many cases where people are being misdiagnosed by doctors who don’t dig deep enough for the true cause of issues. Using the example of severe anxiety, most doctors go straight to psychiatric medicines to control it without looking at the causes of the anxiety itself. While most people will have life stresses going on that are contributing causes, many others may have chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected through supplements and diets rather than just numbing the anxiety with drugs. For me, anxiety is usually a sign of parasites. A psychiatric medicine is not going to kill parasites; I would only be masking symptoms rather than treating the cause. I know of women whose anxiety is cause by hormonal imbalances due to hormonal birth control, but rather than change birth control methods, they choose to take another pill to medicate the symptoms of the first pill. For others, including me, anxiety may be a sign of spiritual or emotional issue that requires a type of healing that just isn't available within mainstream western medicine.

If you are struggling with a symptom that you feel that your doctors have not found the true cause of, please consider working with an intuitive such as myself. I will *never* ask you to stop taking your medications without your doctor’s consent, nor will I judge you for taking them: I understand from personal experience that Western drugs very much have their place in healing. What I will do is give you healing paths to explore with your doctor or with others whom I can recommend. If you don’t feel like you are getting better, then I can help you find changes to make that can change your quality of life radically, and in some cases, eliminate medications you feared you were going to have to take the rest of your life.

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

One of my grandmothers died when I was 17, just days before I left for college. Her funeral was a powerful event in my life, an ending to one part of my life as I moved into a different one. The gathering after the graveside services was held at my mother’s home where I had previously lived. The guests trickled in after a 45 minute drive from the cemetery, and almost all of them brought alcohol with them. One set of in-laws brought a full shoe box of liquor bottles. My grandmother had been married to an Irishman for 30 years, and anyone with strong Irish genes will testify to the abundance of alcohol at most traditional Irish and Irish-American wakes. Yet as I watched all of this alcohol being brought in, my teenage self was able to see a clear irony: My grandmother had been an alcoholic as was her late husband. He died from his drinking; she recovered. She was sober for the entirety of my memory, but that does not erase all the years in which she drank. Even at that young age, it seemed horribly inappropriate to me to commemorate the life of an alcoholic with an abundance of alcohol.

Likewise, every time Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab” comes on the radio, I cringe and turn the station. Just those first lyrics of “They tried to make me go to rehab but I said, ‘No, no, no‘” make me shudder. I don’t understand why radio stations feel it’s appropriate to play a song about an individual refusing to go to rehab when the singer herself died at age 27 from alcohol poisoning likely due to an unintentional overdose. While I’ve never liked the original song or this remake, I do understand it was popular in the general culture. However, it seems to be the song of hers that is most played on the radio almost four years after her death; I only rarely hear “You know I’m No Good” and “Back to Black.” Somehow I doubt that the song is being played as reminder to listeners of the consequences of overdrinking. I often wonder, though, if I’m the only one who sees the irony in "Rehab" being the primary song of hers that is still played.

Our society’s relationship to alcohol is a strange one indeed. We know it’s a problem, and yet we refuse to see the problem right when it’s in front of us. We continue to celebrate a singer who died from an alcohol overdose by frequently playing a song about refusing therapeutic treatment for alcohol addiction. While drunk driving rates have been cut in half in the past 35 years, almost half of all driving fatalities still involve alcohol. I know of too many adults who, despite being educated about the dangers of drunk driving, continue to drive under the influence. I hope that our society will someday start to understand the discordance between our words and our actions around alcohol use and abuse. By ignoring alcohol-related problems, we compound the issues rather than helping solve them.

© 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.)

Health issues go through popular fads just like foods do. The latest food cure-all at one point was açai; goji berries got prime billing for some time, too. Kale and chia have been the health food darlings for a while now, so it’s about time for a new “miracle” food to be marketed. With regards to healing trends, vitamin D deficiency was all the rage for several years. It truly exists, and solving it helps many people. However, just because it gives some people relief doesn't necessarily mean it is the root of the problem. It’s often just a symptom of other larger issue.  

The most recent health “fad” that I've seen in this regard is the MTHFR genetic defect.  There are actually multiple genes that relate to this detoxification process, and I have two of the most common defects involved. I can’t tell you how many people have approached me absolutely certain that they've discovered the root cause of my health issues and how I would be miraculously better just by switching my B vitamins.  This is not news to me, and no, it was not a miracle cure.  It actually didn't make any impact at all upon my health in the grand perspective of things.

Any good holistic professional will already be aware of MTHFR defects, and most will be able to recommend B vitamins that are in the correct form for those who have MTHFR defects. In my case, we actually didn't do the genetic testing until about a year ago; we just correctly presumed based on my symptoms that I had the defects and treated me appropriately. The only reason we ran the tests when we did was because they were included in another genetic profile that my pain specialist wanted to run.

While many people believe that MTHFR defects are the cause of health problems, I believe they are often a symptom of a larger issue. I suspect (but cannot prove) that this is an epigenetic situation: Until an insult to the body occurs, the methylation problems don’t manifest for many individuals. In my case, it was Lyme disease that activated the problematic genes and left me with major detoxification issues.

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

(spoiler alert and trigger alert regarding the death of a child)

My kids and I continue to work our way through Star Trek: The Next Generation. We’re now watching season 7. In episode 7, Counselor Deanna Troi’s mother Lwaxana Troi is aboard the Enterprise as a diplomat assisting with communications with a telepathic race. In the process of working with this new species, Lwaxana begins to have debilitating fatigue and headaches. The medical doctors and others on the crew suspect that her overuse of her telepathic abilities with this new species has drained her. Eventually, Lwaxana collapses and enters what we would describe as a coma.

However, the truth about Lwaxana’s collapse was far more dastardly than just exhaustion. One of the members of the telepathic species, Maques, believes that there is a part of Lwaxana’s mind that she has shut down. As Deanna and Commander Will Riker investigate the past to see what Lwaxana might be repressing, they find a great number of missing years in Lwaxana’s journals, supporting Maques’ theory that there is something major that Lwaxana is hiding. Eventually through a mind meld of sorts, Deanna is able to help her mother’s subconscious process the truth about a situation that was so painful that she’d had to deeply repress it until it festered and caused her body to collapse. The trauma involved was that Lwaxana’s oldest daughter Kestra (Deanna’s older sister whom she’d never previously known about) died in a tragic accident when Deanna was only a baby.  Lwaxana blamed herself for the death of her elder daughter. The pain of losing her child was so excruciating that Lwaxana tried to block it all out so that she could avoid and forget the pain.  Eventually that mental and emotional pain caught up with her and shut down her body.

This isn't science fiction. While the details of the case are very much fictional, the reality of how the body, mind and spirit interact is true.  It is entirely possible for us to store our pain in our mind and our body eventually leading to our body’s collapse. For most of us this process doesn't result in a spontaneous coma. Instead, we have unexplained back pain, fibromyalgia, the flu or cancer among many other health issues. I am in no way denying that all of these conditions have physical, biological roots as well. The flu, for instance, is a virus. However, why is it that with two people in the same family with the same diet one might get the flu every year while the other never gets sick? Clearly genetics may play a role, but stress and other life experiences also condition our bodies to be predisposed to illness or health.

As someone who has experienced the unexpected and tragic death of a child, I know firsthand that it is something that is so traumatic that it could eventually destroy our health if we do not thoroughly process our grief about the situation. The pain that a child dying causes is unlike any other pain in the world.  It’s excruciating. Every day the bereaved parents wake up to feeling that part of their future has been stolen from them. Their empty arms may literally ache from the absence of their child, and they almost certainly will feel the pain of heartache in their chests. In my case, it took thirteen years of work in order to fully process the pain that came from my daughter’s death, in part because I thought I had already processed it all. I didn't realize that there were subconscious memories stored in my body that I still needed to release. Once I finally released those traumatic emotions, I finally found true peace around my daughter’s death.

When we face health challenges, it is important that we work not just to eliminate the pathogens or the pain but that we also relieve and release the emotional pain that is often behind our poor health. This is not always something straightforward and easy. It sometimes takes time to find the roots of our pain or illness and work through them. This process is entirely possible, but oftentimes it requires the assistance of a professional such as me to clarify the issues behind the problems. Lwaxana needed the assistance of Maques and Deanna to go into her mind and find her issues. While I definitely can’t meld with anyone’s mind, I can speak with higher powers who help me find issues stored within the bodies of clients so that they can release whatever is making them ill. I've gone through this process myself; it is what helped me to regain my health after many medical professionals had given up on me. Working with the mind-body-spirit connection can provide incredible healing for us in the real world just as it did for Lwaxana Troi in the fiction of the 24th century.

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

If you want to know God, enjoy the company of lovers. ~Rumi, translated by Coleman Barks

I have an account with many boards on Pinterest that I use for collecting work related articles and pictures.  Because I have boards about relationships and spirituality, Pinterest will often suggest pins to me that are about traditional Christian marriage values.  While I can see where the algorithm is getting the idea these articles might be of interest to me, it couldn't be further from the truth in pinpointing my beliefs.

Lately I’ve been seeing quite a few pins that are variations on the idea that “True Love Always Waits.”  Someone in the Universe must be encouraging me to do some deep healing because this is a very touchy (no pun intended) issue for me based on my personal history. I was raised Catholic and attended an all-girls' Catholic school from grades 6-12. As is required by Catholic teachings, we learned that sex before marriage was a sin. We also learned that boys who pushed us for sex rather than waiting didn't really love us. As young women, we were not expected to actually want to have sex except under pressure from our dates.  These ideas are wrong on so many levels, and in many cases, they are psychologically damaging.

To start with, I do not believe that sex before marriage is a sin.  In my view, sex is an intimate connection between two people. I believe it is sacred, and I believe that it can bring us closer to God.  However, I also believe it can be a lot of fun and can help bond a couple regardless of their marital status. For many people, marriage is no more than a legal piece of paper. It in no way reflects the commitment and love shared by the couple in most cases.  It’s merely a formality for the sake of society.

The idea that sex belongs in marriage began for two different reasons. The first was a male dominated culture that wanted to ensure that the bride was a virgin who would only bear the fruit of her husband’s loins. The second was an attempt to prevent the spread of STDs.  The first is obviously irrelevant in today’s age of genetic testing. The second is still a legitimate concern, though we now have condoms to help with it.

When I was in high school taking a required love and marriage class in my senior year, the concept of sexual compatibility was not even remotely discussed. Sex was presented as having a magic formula of one man and one woman. With a little foreplay thrown in to satisfy the woman, that’s all that a couple needed to have a successful sexual relationship.  The reality of that couldn't be further from the truth. Sex between two amazing people who love each other can still be truly awful if the chemistry is not there or if their sexual preferences are not in alignment with each other. Getting stuck in an unhappy marriage without sexual compatibility is a realistic situation when one believes that sex should not happen until after marriage.  No amount of love or therapy can fix a situation like this.

Another topic that was very much omitted in high school and in our society in general is the idea of women wanting sex: That’s completely healthy and normal. However, if you pay attention to magazine article titles while standing in the checkout line at the grocery store, you’ll quickly notice that our society functions on a misguided belief that all women have low sex drives and all men have high sex drives.  Women aren't supposed to want sex in the same way men do. That means that for women who do want to have sex but are partnered with a man who wants to wait, they can end up feeling like misfits, sexual freaks of nature or undesirable women.

Another common line is that men only want sex for pleasure's sake but that they don’t really love women if they have sex before marriage.  Men wanting sex absolutely doesn't mean they don’t love the women involved.  It means they are human.  When men are wanting sex alone with no emotional involvement or commitment, women may find that situation to be problematic. However, there are a lot of variations between the two extremes.  Finding that fine line of knowing he loves you and wants you for more than just your body is hard, especially when one is young.  However, it’s entirely possible that a man may want to have sex with a woman before marriage to show his love and develop intimacy.

Then there’s that horrible idiom, “Why buy a cow when you can get milk for free?” This line implies that if a woman gives a man sex before marriage, he’ll never marry her.  Aside from the terrible idea of comparing women to farm animals, this saying denigrates both men and women.  Women are not objects to be bought or sold.  Not all men are unable to control their sexual urges nor are they out to just use women for sex.  Many do have good intentions at heart.

In today’s modern world, marriage is not always a viable or practical option. When my ex and I were dating, we were in high school and college; marrying would have meant that we would have lost our health insurance policies through our parents' employers. I have heard of other situations where elderly widows and widowers can’t afford to remarry because they would lose their late spouse’s pension and therefore would not be able to support themselves even meagerly in retirement.  I know another couple who has chosen not to marry because it would cost them tax benefits on the two homes they own, one under each of their names.  Sadly, finances are an important part of survival in our world.

In my own relationship with my ex-husband, the “true love waits” idea was a huge problem for us.  We both grew up Catholic; my ex was far more strict in his moral beliefs than I was, though.  (Ironically, he’s now an atheist.)  He came from a family where sexuality wasn't ever a topic of discussion except to say how wrong sex was before marriage.  Like most young humans, my ex deeply absorbed those views that were being presented to him.  The problem arose when my ex and I had been dating for far too many years to remain celibate (5+ years before we married). There’s no magic number of how long any couple should or shouldn't wait. However, in our case, not having sex actually became very damaging to our relationship after several years even though all those Catholic tales swore that having sex before marriage was the damaging thing. My ex-husband eventually realized much later that his previous views were damaging to our relationship, and he regretted them. His apology during marriage therapy gave me an amazing amount of relief, though it didn't happen soon enough to prevent a great deal of pain in our relationship twenty years earlier.

So what do I teach my children? I have taught them that sex is intimate and powerful. It can be amazing in the right circumstances but it also can be emotionally painful and damaging if it happens in the wrong circumstances. My general belief is that if you’re not willing to deal with the logical consequences of sex (getting pregnant, a realistic risk since no birth control method aside from complete abstinence is 100% reliable), then you shouldn't be having sex. It’s just basic logic to me. Once you’re in a place in your life where you could support and raise a child, then you should wait to have sex with someone who truly cares about you and respects you. That person should see you as a whole person, not just a body to provide physical pleasure. Sex should be a part of an intimate relationship with your partner, an act that brings you closer together regardless of your marital status.

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

Back on March 9th, I was jolted awake during the night to receive a message from higher powers.  I saw a symbol that I think was representative of a car battery not working.  I knew when I saw the symbol that my car battery or alternator would be going out soon. This alone is not shocking. My car burns through 60 month batteries every 12-18 months.  It’s the first time I've gotten notice about it, though. So I began parking my car facing out in the driveway so that it would be easier to jump or tow. Usually my car won’t start first thing in the morning if this is going to be an issue.

Jumping forward to this week, my oldest son came back from a spring break trip with influenza B.  Within 24 hours, I had succumbed as well.  Any time my kids or I get sick, I check in with higher powers as to what would be the best treatment path for us.  For my son, it was a goldenseal blend plus vitamin C.  For me, I got told I needed vitamin D plus other things that I am already on because of my Lyme treatment.

Two days into the illness, I went to see my chiropractor.  We’d texted beforehand, so he knew I was coming in with the flu; he knew as I do that chiropractic work makes it much easier for my body to fight whatever it is up against.  The session went well and was not unexpected for me:  My body was more interested in talking about the Lyme that was rapidly dying off because of the fever the flu is inducing.  

On the way home, I ran into a local establishment where I had called in an order for several salads so that I wouldn't have to prepare foods over the next few days.  I was in the store for less than two minutes (and I took germ spreading precautions), but when I went back out to the car, it would not start.  I was feeling terrible and wasn't at home; this was not where I wanted to be stuck.  Mercifully, one of the employees was able to jump my car and chatted with me from a safe distance while we waited for enough juice to start my car.  

Five minutes later, the car died while I was going 55 mph on a major road coming home.  Thankfully, I was at the top of a hill, and when I got to the bottom of the hill, I was able to pull over next to an inlet area.  There wasn't enough power in the car for my flashers to even work.  The temperature was only in the 70s, but it was 100% full sun.  I grabbed my Kindle and went to sit over on the blacktop inlet.  Between my fever, the sun, and the blacktop, I was sweating up a storm for the half-hour until my ex-husband could get there and get my car going again.

I’m sure if outsiders were to listen in to my conversations with my spirit guides, many would think me a madwoman.  Most of us talk to ourselves, though not all of us get answers back from unseen others!  Once I got home from the whole ordeal, I complained to my spirit guides about how hot and sweaty I was.  Someone responded to me, “That was the point!”  Clearly they hadn't meant that I needed Vitamin D in a bottle:  They wanted me to get it straight from the source with a good deal of sweating included.  

What’s amazing is that after I napped when I got home, I woke up feeling WAY better than I had in the previous 48 hours.  All of that sun and sweat had done me good.  In addition, my body had been able to tolerate all the chemical exposures to the engine and exhaust toxins along this adventure.  Not so long ago, an event like this would have given me a fibro flare at a minimum and most likely a bonus migraine, too.  My liver is in better shape and is handling chemical exposures better.  

When crazy things happen around me, I trust that higher powers are involved and there is a reason for it all even if I can’t understand it all.  I now have a translation for that symbol I saw in my vision, plus I know that I can handle more than I previously could with regards to exhaust.  Moreover, this flu is serving a major purpose in my life of helping my immune system fight off the Lyme at a faster rate than it could previously.  Never would I have thought that I would be grateful for the flu or car trouble, but here I am, seeing these challenges as unexpected blessings in my life!

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

When children are young, they have no sense of shame about their bodies until older humans teach them that their bodies are something to hide.  Modesty is not a trait that we are born with.  Any parent of a toddler or young child can affirm that.  When my kids were little, we used to call my youngest “the gingerbread man” after a Joe Scruggs song by the same name from a musical calledNot Afraid of the Dark.  In that song, a young child has gotten out of the tub and begins his/her/hir nightly streaking routine:

"Bathtime's over; I’m almost a prune.
Get your pajamas on ‘cause it’s bedtime soon.
Mom dries me off; she holds my pjs out
But I run past her and then I shout
Singing, 'Run, Run as fast as you can.
You can’t catch me; I’m the gingerbread man.'
Mom’s chasing me, my pajamas in her hand
She can't catch me; I'm the gingerbread man.
I run past Dad. He says I look cute
Running by in my birthday suit.
Mom's getting tired; she hands my pjs to dad.
And this is the most fun that I've ever had."

Young children love being naked.  It’s their natural state.  Yet we as adults try to hide nudity from our children.  We consider it taboo for children to see naked bodies.  This is more a reflection of our own fears rather than a need to protect them from something that is completely unnatural and dangerous:  The human body in its most natural state is nothing to be ashamed of or to fear.

However, most of us grow up, and we become conditioned by society to hide our bodies.  Even more problematically, we become ashamed of our bodies, too.  We learn from the media, from movies, and from others around us that if our body is anything less than perfect, we should not show or share it.  While most of our society doesn't endorse burqas, we do have ideals about what a “bikini body” is and who is entitled to wear a bikini.

Here's a shocker, though:  Most bodies don’t look like Photoshopped models.  We come in all shapes and sizes.  Many years ago, I stumbled upon The Shape of a Mother when I was looking for photos of twin skin to explain it to someone.  (Twin skin is the abnormally stretched and baggy abdominal skin that many mothers of multiples end up with after their pregnancies are over.)  I was thrilled to see someone trying to normalize what women's bodies look like after pregnancy.  More projects like this one such as Expose Photoshoot by Liora K Photography serve to help normalize women’s bodies as beautiful no matter what shape, size, or color they are.  Books like This is Who I Am: Our Bodies in All Shapes and Sizes by Roseanne Olson further the cause of accepting our bodies as they are.  Women don’t have to be skinny and smooth to be beautiful:  They are already perfect in their own right just by being themselves.

As I have reentered the dating world, I've found a very bizarre dominant idea that many middle-aged heterosexual men want women to have “perfect” bodies.  The men want the women to be skinny, fit, and for lack of a better term, future trophy wives.  The men who are willing to accept women who don’t live up to society's ideals of a perfect body are few and far between.  It seems that most men have absorbed the idea that women should look like models even if the men themselves aren't in the greatest shape.  I've heard from male friends that it’s true on the other side of the fence as well:  Most women want men who are athletic or at least slender in build.  It's a sad commentary on our society when looks are valued far more than personalities, talents, and abilities. 

So how do we go about changing these false ideals?  Projects such as the above ones help to breakdown the distorted notions of beauty that have been created in our society.  Boycotting dating sites such as Tinder which place an emphasis on looks over anything is a way to help squelch such practices.  Most importantly, we need to be teaching our children that they are so much more than the shape of their bodies.  We need to teach them not to be ashamed of their bodies.  They are amazing people no matter what they look like.  If we teach them to accept themselves just as they are, then perhaps future generations will be able to change our distorted ideals which use specific physical standards to judge beauty rather than looking at the whole person.

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

In recent months, my kids and I have been watching Star Trek: The Next Generation.  I watched a bunch of the episodes back in the 1990s in reruns, but this is the first time around for my kids.  It’s been fun seeing their reactions to the series, especially to “‘80s hair” which they love to ridicule.  For me, I’m seeing totally different things this time around than I saw twenty years ago.

In season six, many of the episodes at the beginning of the season were appealing to me for how insightful they actually are.  One episode in particular, “Realm of Fear,” deals with psychological phobias.  As a clear parody to fear of flying in our time, Lieutenant Barclay has a severe fear of transporting.  Ship’s counselor and empath Deanna Troi teaches Barclay a Betazoid relaxation technique known as plexing.  To engage in plexing, the person who is experiencing fear taps on a point on the neck behind the ear.  This point corresponds with gallbladder 12 in Chinese acupuncture; one of its uses is actually for regulating and calming the spirit.

As I watched this episode and as Troi began teaching Barclay about flexing, I immediately thought, “That’s basically EFT!”  EFT is short for Emotional Freedom Technique, and it’s an increasingly popular method of conquering psychological, emotional, and physical issues.   I've known people who have used it for releasing stored trauma, for controlling stress and anxiety, and for weight loss among many other issues.  While it is always great to learn a method like this from an experienced practitioner who is also able to assist with issues that might arise along the way, there are videos on the internet to teach it to oneself.

In EFT, which is sometimes just called “tapping,” an individual taps on a series of acupuncture points while reciting a formulaic mantra that s/he/ze adapts to the specific situation at hand.  So, for example, if I were dealing with stage fright, I would tap on the designated series of points while reciting to myself, “I deeply love and accept myself, and I am an amazing actress who feels completely comfortable on the stage.”  I would recite this mantra as I worked my way through all of the EFT tapping points.

I was first introduced to EFT about eight years ago.  To be honest, I absolutely hated it when I was introduced to it.  It made me feel awkward.  The formulaic mantra did not work for me.  Nothing about it felt right.  However, I was open to trying it because I had several friends who absolutely loved it.  Despite my efforts, it just didn’t seem like the right approach to me, so I gave up on it.  

A couple of years later, I began working with a group of chiropractors who use a different set of tapping points across the entire body without a mantra as they help process stored trauma.  They tap on the patients using the points that show up during an applied kinesiology chiropractic session.  This set of points actually rings far more true for me, and I will often notice that some of those points are the ones that hurt when I am in emotional distress.

As I developed my intuitive abilities, I began pulling up emotional traumas from this life and past lives that I needed to work through.  As the deep painful emotions came to the surface, I began tapping on my own.  I listened to my intuition, and I tapped where I was being told.  Most of the points are the ones that the chiropractors I see use, some are EFT points, but others are acupuncture points that aren't commonly used for processing emotional pain.  They are ones that I need to use, though.  I then formulate my own mantra that works for me for that particular situation.  For example, sometimes the mantra is, “The past is the past; I am safe now.”  Other times it might be, “I am alive and healthy.”  Whatever the necessary mantra is, it quickly comes to mind for me and I am certain it is what I need to work through that issue.  On my own, I have used tapping to help clear various stored traumas.  I couldn’t imagine not having that skill to help me in my healing.

As I began talking to my youngest child after we watched the show, I told him that plexing was a version of a technique that therapists use to help people with stress.  His response was, “That’s real?”  It was a surprise to him that there a similar successful method for handling stress; he had assumed it was totally science fiction.  Plexing may be a science fiction, but EFT is definitely not.  It helps many people to release stored emotions in their bodies and to find a greater peace than talk therapy alone can provide.  If you are searching for a new therapist or life coach, I highly recommend working with one who uses EFT or one of the many other techniques out there for processing the traumas that might be holding you back.

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

I spent a significant portion of my childhood and the early part of my adulthood as a Catholic; at one point, my Catholic school classmates believed I was the mostly likely person in our class of 51 to become a nun if not Pope.  (I was actually the first to get married, having never entered the convent; two other classmates did enter the convent with one professing final vows.)  I also received my master’s degree from Boston College in theology with an emphasis on the history of Christianity.  Thus, when issues around Catholicism arise in society, they often intrigue me.  One such topic is the popular tradition of giving up something for Lent. 

In Catholicism and other Christian traditions, the idea behind giving something up for Lent is to make a sacrifice that is in some way a tribute to Jesus having made the ultimate sacrifice of his life to erase the original sin of humanity. In days of old, the Lenten sacrifices were meant to be a form of penance, a way of apologizing to God for one’s sinful nature. Even now, whatever one gives up is meant to be done as a gift to God.  Back in the dark ages when I was in high school (also known as the late 1980s), priests would encourage parishioners in their Sunday homilies not to give something up for Lent.  Rather, they would push for church members to do something positive instead.  They argued that in today’s world, for most middle and upper class church goers, giving up soda for six weeks was not a real sacrifice that in any way made a decent gift to God.  On the other hand, if one took the money one saved from not drinking soda and donated it to a homeless shelter or a food bank, that action made the sacrifice more valuable.  Many of us who attended Sunday school or Catholic schools were even sent home with paperboard Lenten offering boxes to collect those funds for a specific charity. Likewise, instead of giving up chocolate, the priests encouraged people to make a donation of their time to a non-profit in need or to a community member who could use an extra hand.

I am no longer Catholic by any stretch of the imagination, yet it bewilders me when I see non-Christians using Lent as a reason to give something up.  I even know atheists, who clearly do not believe in Jesus' sacrifice, who give up food items for Lent.  For them, Lent seems to be just a time period between two big parties (Mardi Gras and Easter) that can help them with self-control and dieting.  To me, it seems as though all the “cool kids” are doing it, so others jump on the bandwagon to use Lent as a means of moral support while they give up some high caloric item that isn't really good for them.  I actually find this disrespectful to Christian traditions and beliefs.  Almost no one in our American society would dream of using Ramadan as an excuse for a crash diet or a 30 day juice cleanse, yet co-opting a very holy Christian time period of preparation and spiritual cleansing to use as a time of dieting is seen as socially acceptable. 

If you are someone who gives up food items or diets in some way for Lent, I strongly encourage you to examine your motivations.  Why do you use this time period to give something up?  Who benefits from you giving up your favorite treat?  How do you use the money that you aren’t spending on those lattes or mochaccinos? Are you co-opting a devout religious time for something that has nothing to do with religion?  Does this serve a higher purpose or is it an act of selfishness you are partaking in?  Are you doing this act quietly or are you using it to get attention on Facebook or elsewhere?  Having grown up with a narcissist who shamelessly sought attention, I've always appreciated the following Bible verses:

If you choose to do something for Lent as a Christian or non-Christian, I suggest you adapt your “sacrifice” in some way to benefit others.  If you are running an extra mile each day in Lent, consider taking along your elderly neighbor’s dog with you, benefiting both the neighbor and the dog.  If you are abstaining from a delectable treat during this time period, donate the funds you saved to a charity you support.  If possible, also donate your time to a group or individual who could use your assistance.  These are ways in which we can give something up while simultaneously helping others and benefiting ourselves.

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

For the longest time, I would not accept that I needed a disabled parking placard.  I rarely went anywhere, and when I did, I was usually able to find close parking.  However, that all changed when my Lyme doctor moved into a medical complex for which most of the parking was on the next block.  I quickly got him write the prescription for the permit.  Years later, another friend with Lyme taught me to quit looking at it as disabled parking but instead to refer to it as “rock star parking.”  The humor of that idea makes the need for the permit a little easier to accept.

I am now truly grateful for that permit as it enables me to save precious energy and limit my pain. The city of Austin also offers extra benefits to those with disabled permits including free parking and no time limits at any city parking meters.  However, those benefits are often negated by the fact that parking is not available. The city does have disabled parking spots scattered around downtown, but they’re rarely where I need them to be.  In one location, there are five disabled spots all clustered together on one block with no important buildings on it—in other words, inconveniently located.  I’ve also had times where the nearest parking I can find is four or six blocks away from where I want to go, and since walking even a block can be difficult for me, that’s not close enough.  I end up having to go home without attending the event I wanted to go to.

The same is true at many big public events such as those held at Zilker Park or various farmers’ markets.  It’s clear that those planning the events assume that all who are disabled are in motorized wheelchairs or have people to push them in their wheelchairs.  They don’t realize that many of those who are disabled are mobility impaired without a wheelchair. Even though they provide the closest parking for the disabled, it’s still not close enough at some events.  It means those events are inaccessible for me.

Murphy’s law dictates that there is sometimes a surplus of disabled parking spots when there are no other parking spots to be found such as at a shopping center.  However, there never seem to be enough at Whole Foods when I am at the downtown store, the Gateway store, or at the Domain. 

I’ve also run into major problems with not enough disabled parking at one of my doctors’ offices.  When I have appointments there that are after 8 a.m., I often cannot find flat surface parking, and the building is situated on one of the few hills in Austin.  That means that if I can’t find a flat surface spot, disabled or not, I can’t park my car and I can’t get in to my appointments.  I’ve asked the building management to add additional spots, but I was ignored.  As a result, I contacted the Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation to discover that any medical building built since 2012 or which has performed any sort of renovation on the facility since 2012 is required to designate 20% of their parking as disabled.  Individuals can file a complaint with TDLR to start an investigation into violations.  Unfortunately, however, the grandfathering clause on this code means that many medical buildings are exempt from this requirement.

So why is this lack of disabled parking a growing problem?  I’ve rarely seen abuse of disabled parking spots in terms of those without permits using them.  I’ve also never seen offenders ticketed for parking illegally despite the hefty fines they would face if caught, so I’m sure that does motivate some people to abuse the system.

I think the larger problem is with the aging baby boomer population which is increasing the number of individuals who genuinely need disabled parking, yet the laws are not being changed to increase the number of spots available.  I also think there are doctors who will liberally dispense placards without justification merely because patients ask.  Furthermore, in Texas, each disabled individual can get two placards at a time when no person really needs more than one:  I used to easily move my only one between our two cars when my ex-husband and I still lived together.  By distributing an extra placard to each disabled person, the system is setting up an easy way to commit fraud.  Disabled parking permits definitely have a black market value:  One friend had her car broken into and the only thing stolen was her placard.  Even if individuals don’t sell their extra placard, they could illegally gift it to a friend.  While one is required to provide ID showing that the permit is his/hers/hirs if questioned by an officer, I’ve never seen this happen, either.

Disabled parking is vital to those of us with chronic and extreme health issues.  I’m grateful it exists.  However, it’s a far from perfect system that needs a great deal of updating and revision to keep up with the changing demands of our current world.

© 2015 Green Heart Guidance

I am dying from the treatment of too many physicians.  ~Alexander the Great

Over almost 12 years of dealing with chronic illness plus another 28 years of living, I’ve worked with many health practitioners.  One of the harder things for me to face is when I have to fire a practitioner.  In the case of general practitioners whom I only saw a few times a year, it wasn’t as big of a deal.  I doubt they even noticed when I switched to another doctor.  But when one is working with practitioners on a weekly basis, if not more frequently, intimate relationships develop that are harder to walk away from.  Still, it’s important to move on if one’s health care providers are not meeting one’s needs.

In the past, I often felt guilt when I have left a practitioner, especially when it is someone who has a great reputation in the healing community.  The guilt was because I felt like a failure because I couldn’t make the relationship with that practitioner work; that was an issue I had to work through to understand that there was no need for guilt. The truly best practitioners will not hold anger against you for moving on.  They will know that you are now meant to work with someone else.  Not every practitioner is right for every client or patient, and even if one practitioner is right for you at a certain point in your life, he/she/ze may not be right for you after a few years.  We all grow and change.

Psychotherapists are one type of provider with whom it can be very hard to find the right person to work with.  Sometimes you know right away that the match is good or bad, and sometimes it’s not as easy to figure out whether you should move on.  When I was looking for a therapist in recent years, it took five therapists before I found the right one for me.  The first woman I was with for five weeks, but she would just let me babble and stare at me before asking me generic questions like, “How do you feel about that?”  I prefer my therapists to interact more with me and guide me in my healing.  The second therapist was a wonderful woman whom I think will develop into an amazing practitioner, but she simply didn’t have the experience to work with someone dealing with my issues.  Another therapist I saw lasted eight weeks, though I knew after four that I should leave.  I was at a very stressful juncture in my life when I thought any therapist was better than no therapist.  Unfortunately, that’s not true.  This therapist was very patronizing and too emotionally detached from her clients.  While she has a great reputation among other therapists in the area, she was not the right therapist for an intuitive empath for me.  The fourth therapist I was with for four months; she was fabulous, and I still recommend her to others.  However, we hit a juncture where her personal issues interfered with my treatment, and I knew it was time to move on because she was not going to be able to meet my needs.  The final therapist who didn’t work out was one who immediately began to dump her issues on me, wanting me to heal her rather than her assisting me in my healing.  It took only two weeks for me to see that she was far too toxic of a person for me to work with.  After such a long road, the therapist I finally ended up with is an amazing woman whom I’ve worked with for three years.  She’s helped me to grow and change in amazing ways.  I’m grateful for all she’s taught me.  The journey to find her was long, but it was worth it in the end.

One of the other lessons I’ve had to learn is that reputation not everything.  Just because a person is supposedly “the best” in your area, that person may not be the best for you.  When my twins were born, I saw a lactation consultant who is often considered the best (probably because she tells people she is).  Unfortunately, she gave me a great deal of bad advice which created further problems with breastfeeding.  It was actually the lactation consultants at Mom’s Place, a WIC center to support breastfeeding mothers, who helped repair and save my breastfeeding relationship with my twins. I will always be grateful for how much they helped me.  Likewise, I spent many years seeing a local bodyworker who has an amazing reputation in the Austin healing community.  However, she was just not the right person for me and my body.  I’ve found others who have been able to make more progress in less time using the same modalities that she did.

The more frustrating situations for me to leave are ones wherein the practitioners are really talented and amazing people whose work I love but whose personalities become unbearable for me.  I saw one bodyworker who did great work, but by the time I quit seeing her, I was leaving her office feeling judged and criticized every single time.  I was resenting the time I was spending with her rather than benefitting from it.  While she was well-meaning, it was time for me to set boundaries to protect my emotional self while still getting the physical care I needed. Likewise, another practitioner I saw was amazingly gifted but his ego began getting in the way of our work.  He was unable to wrap his mind around the realities of my life, including my gluten sensitivities, and was issuing too much judgment about my personal life for me to continue seeing him.  He’s someone whom I really miss seeing, but the emotional toxicity was just not supportive of healing for me.  A third bodyworker I previously saw has narcissist personality disorder; she was suffocating to work with.  After leaving all of these practitioners, I talked with other people who had the same experiences with them which helped me to understand it wasn’t my issues causing the difficulties in these situations.

I’ve also learned the hard way that when a practitioner physically hurts me, it’s absolutely time to leave. Second chances just end up causing me more trauma.  In one case, I left my first appointment at a chiropractor’s office feeling emotionally and physically drained.  By the time I got home, I was in awful physical pain.  I had to get a massage therapist to fix what the chiropractor had done to me.  So many others had sworn to me about this man’s healing ability, but I didn’t experience it.  Fortunately, I had enough sense not to go back to him again.  In other cases, it took me more than once to learn the lesson.  There’s a local holistic dentist whom I saw for many years.  I struggle with anesthetics not working properly for me which means dental work can be hellish at best if I don’t have a compassionate practitioner who is willing to listen to me and re-medicate frequently.  This dentist was not patient, and he didn’t care if I was in pain.  The first time when he was doing work, it hurt, but it wasn’t bad.  The second time landed me in a PTSD state because the pain was so horrendous but yet he wouldn’t stop working on me because he told me that I was fine.  Had I heeded the lesson the first time, I wouldn’t have put myself through the awful pain I endured the second.

Beyond physical and emotional pain, practitioners can also cause spiritual or metaphysical problems.  It is VERY important never to let someone who is in an unhealthy altered state due to drugs and/or alcohol do metaphysical work involving contact on your body.  I unfortunately learned this one the hard way as a practitioner I had been seeing for a while attempted to work on me while intoxicated by cold medicine.  The result created an energetic mess that left me in physical pain and required a visit to another practitioner to clean up the damage.

It’s important to remember that if a licensed practitioner hurts you, there is recourse for reporting them to state boards. Psychotherapists, dentists, doctors, medical assistants, and acupuncturists, massage therapists, licensed midwives, nurses, chiropractors, and other practitioners all can be investigated for malpractice.  Please remember that filing a complaint will have serious personal and professional impacts on the person whom you are reporting.  While you should never hesitate to report an unethical or dangerous practitioner, the complaint process is not a way to air vendettas or deal with personality differences.  I have never filed a complaint against a practitioner, though I regret not filing one against the dentist who harmed me four years ago.  I also would have filed a complaint against the doctor who sexually harassed me when I was in college if I’d known that I could.  However, at that time I was uneducated about such things, and those were the days before the internet was what it is today.

When I have left one practitioner, the new one whom I switch to usually ends up being far more talented than the previous one.  The transition to a new practitioner can be stressful, yet I have always ended up in very productive and beneficial healing relationships when I follow my gut about moving on.

© 2015 Green Heart Guidance

(As a reminder, I am not a medical doctor or a licensed psychologist.  The opinions below are just that:  My personal opinions.  They do not and should not be construed as official diagnoses.)

For many years now, I have watched The Bachelor(ette).  It’s a far cry from my usual fair of Masterpiece Theatre, and while it has nothing to do with the reality of most relationships, I am still highly entertained by most seasons of it.  A few years ago, I found out that a high school friend of mine was a closet fan as well, and so we now virtually watch it together, having a great time making fun of its absurdities.

This season (Chris Soules, “Prince Farming”) has been entertaining, to say the least.  However, there have been several things in recent weeks that have left me frustrated in how they were handled on the show.  One such incident occurred in week five after one of the women, Jade, fell into the Rio Grande during a rafting excursion (shown on the YouTube video below).  Jade describes that she has “a condition where my body goes into hypothermia at … normal temperatures it shouldn’t which causes … my hands and my feet to lose circulation.”  It really bothered me that either she didn’t name this disorder or that ABC edited it out.  This health issue is called Raynaud’s Phenomenon, and it’s estimated that millions of Americans deal with it.  By naming this disorder, in just a few seconds, ABC could have given legitimacy to a true health issue that many people suffer from rather than making it seem like Jade was simply seeking attention.  Of course, the latter is clearly their goal since controversy and strife make for better ratings.

I’ve dealt with secondary Raynaud’s personally; it was a side effect of Lyme Disease.  For me, it usually only manifest going between major differences in temperature such as outdoors in winter (35F) to indoors in the heat (70F) or outdoors in summer (100F) to indoors in the AC (75F). The sudden rapid temperature change is what triggered the symptoms in my extremities.   There was no visible change in my skin on my hands and feet as there are for some people as demonstrated in the photo above.  Instead, it “just” hurt like holy heck, sort of like an extreme version of a burn, a cramp, and pins and needles combined.  However, when removing my clothing in my cold bathroom during winter to shower, the temperature change would cause my nipples to sometimes get very painfully hard and very white, not something most people around me would get to see.  The only thing that really helped eliminate the symptoms of Raynaud’s was time as my body slowly acclimated to the change in temperature.  Most of the time my hands and feet were too painful for someone to touch or rub.

As with many invisible illnesses, there are doubters and naysayers when someone is truly suffering.  One of the other women on the show, Kelsey, very uncompassionately saw Jade as strategically using her disorder to get more attention from Chris Soules.  Kelsey announces repeatedly in an exasperated voice “I’m fine!” because she is upset she doesn’t have something to use to get extra attention from the Bachelor.  If Kelsey only knew how painful the experience Jade was going through, she might not have been so jealous of the extra attention, and Kelsey might actually have been saying a prayer of gratitude that she is fine.  Her disgust at someone else’s pain and need for assistance was reprehensible at best.

After Chris finished rubbing Jade’s feet for her, another bachelorette jokingly asked, “Alright, are we forming a line?” Chris jokingly replied as he laughed, “Ok, who’s next?”  That kind of joking around the incident felt healthy and normal.  It acknowledged that many of the other women would love a foot rub (as many of us do!), but at the same time it didn’t demean Jade’s pain in any way.

For me personally as I watched this incident, one of the biggest revelations for me was the realization that I no longer deal with Raynaud’s.  That may sound strange, but I don’t know when in the past few years I stopped having to deal with it.  At some point, my health improved enough that this was no longer one of my body’s many problems.  However, given how many other symptoms and pains I deal with on a daily basis, I didn’t even notice when this major one disappeared.  I am so grateful that I can say that I have healed enough that Raynaud’s is no longer an issue for me, but I still feel a great deal of compassion for those who suffer from it’s annoying and extreme painfulness.

© 2015 Green Heart Guidance

(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.)

Sorry, guys.  I know it’s not a topic you find fascinating for the most part.

Like most women, menstrual cramps have been very bothersome for me at various points of my life.  I do not have endometriosis, so my suggestions may not be of use for those with more severe pain.  However, I have found a few things that help make life a little less painful in this regard.

When I was having problems with cramping in college, I was advised to change my diet:  No chocolate and less sugar.  Those are not recommendations that a woman with PMS wants to hear, and at that point, I didn’t have the willpower or desire to follow them.  I wanted an “easy” magic solution.  However, as I’ve aged and I’ve had to make far more severe changes to my diet, I’ve found that it does affect cramping greatly.  The most important thing for me is eating organic.  It really does reduce the cramping. 

What I’ve discovered overall is that the more I’m detoxing, the worse the cramps can get.  Our bodies have to detox all the chemicals we are exposed to, including pesticides on conventional foods.  Menstruation is one of our bodies’ ways of detoxing:  It is a means of elimination just like mucus, sweat, urine, feces, and vomit. Thus, eating organic is helping reduce my cramps by reducing the amount of toxins I’m exposed to.  However, I also find that the more chemical exposures from being out in public in scented places, the more intense and painful my cramps are in a given month.

At some point along the line I read somewhere that orgasm can help relieve menstrual cramps.  I’ve found that sometimes it helps for a very short while, but sex is not usually on the top of one’s list of things to try when cramps are bad.  (However, this is the part of the article that I’m sure many guys would find interesting!)

Cramp bark is an herbal option to help reduce menstrual cramps.  I learned about it during my last pregnancy at the recommendation of my midwife when it really helped with intense Braxton Hicks contractions.  It also can help reduce the cramping pain during menstruation.  In tincture form, it’s pretty strong tasting, but if you follow it with a chaser of a strong tasting beverage (like orange juice), you can get the taste out of your mouth fairly quickly.

One other correlation that I’ve found is that when Lyme is dying off intensely in my body at the same time as my period, the pain from both gets worse.  I’m not sure what the exact mechanism of this is, but I suspect that it has to do with the total load of pain my body is dealing with creating an exponential rather than linear increase in pain.  I’m not alone in dealing with this phenomenon:  Many women end up with menstrual cycles and Lyme cycles happening at the same time, and it can create a great deal of misery.

© 2015 Green Heart Guidance

(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.)

The client whom this post refers to has read and approved the information.  He wants to share this information anonymously but for obvious reasons would prefer not to blog about it himself.  Please be assured I will not share personal information about you unless under a legal obligation to do so!

American society is obsessed with sex:  It’s everywhere in advertising, music, movies, and television.  Yet at the same time, our society doesn’t like to talk about problems around sex including sexually transmitted infections and sexual dysfunction.  It’s a bitter irony that can be quite frustrating when one is caught in the problems and can’t find help.  Even medical practitioners are sometimes very uncomfortable talking about sex, sexuality, and hormonal issues: I’ve run into this issue myself.  It’s problematic when one is desperate for help but can’t find it.

One of my male clients was having problems with premature ejaculation, a condition that occurs when a man ejaculates much sooner than desired during sexual activities.  This client had seen several doctors and alternative practitioners, but none offered solutions he hadn’t already tried.  The standard advice from them and from the internet was to use condoms to slow things down and to think non-sexy thoughts.  Neither helped at all.

As my client pursued remedies for the adrenal fatigue causing some of his other health problems, he actually found the solution to his premature ejaculation issues.  Correcting his very low cortisol levels ended up being the solution to the sexual problems as well.  However, this information is not readily available on the web and even the doctor treating him for adrenal fatigue didn’t realize that this would help rectify the sexual problem.  

This is a situation where a medical intuitive like myself may be able to help you find solutions to problems that aren’t obvious to Western doctors.  Someone like me can also direct you towards health care providers who are good at working with non-standard solutions to problems that Western medicine isn’t sure how to handle.  The solutions that an intuitive can come up with under the guidance of higher powers can be truly life changing.  

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

This holiday season, please think twice before you give scented products as holiday gifts.  Many studies over the years have concluded that between 11% and 30% of the population is sensitive to fragrances at some level; there are probably more who don’t recognize that their health issues are due to fragrance sensitivity.  Those people include Cindy McCain, wife of former presidential candidate Senator John McCain, who though she suffers from disabling migraines, still carried perfume in her luggage and made herself very sick when the bottle broke. 

Periodically, new studies confirm that scented products contain dozens of toxic chemicals that can have dangerous short term and long term effects (including being carcinogens).  These products include but are not limited to synthetic scented candles, air fresheners, perfumes, colognes, aftershaves, lotions, and more.  Those most at risk for short term problems are those with allergies, asthma, eczema, and migraines.  All of us are at risk for the long term problems.

I am one of those who is sensitive to fragrances, and I have been all my life.  I’ve always been at risk of breaking out into a rash if I touched a scented product.  Many years ago when I was a newlywed and not yet sick with MCS and Lyme, one of my new in-laws gave me perfume as a Christmas present.  I politely thanked her, set it aside, and mentally noted that I would send it to Goodwill as soon as possible.  The giver, however, kept pressing my then-husband to tell her how much I liked the gift.  He finally had to tell her, “Look, she’s sensitive to perfume.  She can’t wear it.”  While the gift was given from a place of generosity, it was one that had the potential to cause a reaction for me.

Since Lyme disrupted my health, however, I’ve become one of the estimated 1-2% who are severely reactive to synthetic chemicals.  I have a diagnosis of multiple chemical sensitivities (MCS).  My sensitivities are so severe that I can’t be in a room with a plug-in air freshener or a lit scented candle.  If someone gets near me wearing perfume, I have to get up and move or leave the room depending on its size or ventilation.  If I don’t, I end up with fibromyalgia flares, asthma attacks and migraines.  At one point, the chemical sensitivities were so severe that I became homebound because minor exposures would incapacitate me for days.

So this holiday season, as you think about giving scented products as gifts to others, consider whether or not those items really are the best choice for the recipient or those around them.  Scented products can cause short term pain and long term health issues.   As alternatives, consider attending a local farmers’ market, visiting a craft festival, or shopping at a holistic store.  Investigate options in those places for safer products including natural perfumes, candles, and lotions crafted from essential oils; better yet, consider fragrance free items that are far less likely to cause issues for the person receiving the gift.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

(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.)

A recent article on Forbes describes the most outlandish reasons for calling in sick that it could find.  The article states, “For the last 10 years, job listing site CareerBuilder has put out a list it calls ‘The Most Unbelievable Excuses for Calling in Sick.’ … Nearly one in five employers (18%) says they have fired an employee for calling in sick with a fake excuse.”

I completely get firing an employee for bad excuses.  In one of my previous jobs, I inherited an employee who had gotten very used to doing what he wanted when he wanted if he wanted, including showing up for work.  One of his favorite excuses was that his old car wouldn’t start.  That is a legitimate excuse, and any of us who have owned a car, especially an older model car, have been there.  However, this employee lived on a bus route that would have taken him 15 minutes to get to work when combined with walking about four blocks.  It wasn’t that he’d be late while he put the car in the shop:  He just flat out wouldn’t show.  In contrast, when my only car died, I hitched a ride with a neighbor to her work, walked a mile, and then took two busses to get to the office.  My car being in the shop wasn’t enough to stop me from going in.

However, three of the ten excuses on the Forbes list seem legitimate to me.  That either shows that my perspective on life is very different than others' or that this list is really weak.  So my responses to these three reasons for absences are as follows.

“3. I was sitting in the bathroom and my feet and legs fell asleep. When I stood up, I fell and broke my ankle.”

Um, yeah.  Been there, done that, sort of.  Three years ago, I was talking with my ex-husband about an intense topic.  While I was sitting in a hard kitchen chair, I had my leg tucked under me as I often do.  When we finished talking, I realized my foot was asleep.  I stood up and tried to put pressure on it to wake it up.  As I stood up, my foot gave way, twisting my ankle.  I collapsed onto the hardwood floors, landing with my body on top of my left foot.  I knew immediately I had done damage and was at my chiropractor’s office within an hour.  Mercifully, I only caused a bad sprain, but it took about a month of adjustments before it got somewhat back to normal.  Had I landed slightly differently, I am sure I could have broken a bone.  This reason seems plausible to me.

“8. I had a gall stone I wanted to heal holistically.”

This definitely is a legitimate reason for absence, and the fact it’s included on this list mainly reflects a prejudice in our society against natural healing.  Gall stones are incredibly painful as anyone who has had them or witnessed someone with them can tell you.  They can make one sick enough to need to skip work; they often land people in the emergency room, though aside from surgery, Western medicine doesn’t offer a lot of help with the gall stones.  Thus, natural medicine is the only real option if one can’t or won’t have surgery.  There are various holistic ways to go about dealing with gallstones, and some of them involve a lot of bathroom time.  One definitely wouldn’t want to leave home.  This reason is completely plausible, and it’s one that might cut down on future absences of the employee.

“9. I caught my uniform on fire by putting it in the microwave to dry.”

While this does reflect a certain level of ignorance in the employee, it’s also realistic.  When I worked at a fast food restaurant, we were only given one uniform.  Eventually after I had been there for quite a while I was able to get a second.  However, having only one uniform meant that employees had to wash our uniforms nightly because they reeked of grease after only one shift.  If one doesn’t have laundry machines that they own, then one is having to either hand wash the uniform or pay for using a washer daily which adds up.  Line drying is a way to save money when you are making minimum wage.  However, if you work an afternoon shift, go out, and get home late, your uniform may not be able to dry overnight before you need to be back early in the morning.  Out of desperation, an employee could resort to drastic measures to try and dry it. 

I’ve also had situations where I’ve spilled food or leaked breastmilk on clothes right before I needed to go somewhere.  If that is the only outfit you can wear to the place you are going (such as a work uniform), then you must quickly try to get it cleaned and dried in order to go.  This could also result in an act of desperation of shoving an outfit in a microwave to dry.

When I was in growing up, my mother used to do a lot of crafty stuff.  One of the things she would make was pinecone wreaths. To prepare the pinecones, one puts them on low heat in the oven in order to kill any creatures that might be growing in them.  One day, she decided to microwave the pinecones instead.  The result was that the pinecones caught on fire and in turn caught the microwave on fire.  The lesson I learned at a very young age is that you don’t put anything but food in the microwave, and even then, you keep an eye on it!

So the possibility of an employee catching a uniform on fire in the microwave is realistic.  Having more than one uniform would help solve this problem, but many fast food employers are unfortunately not willing to spend that extra money on their employees.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

 (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.)

I previously reviewed Healing Yoga for Aches and Pains by Lisa Bennet Matkin and Charles Matkin.  Today’s review encompasses another video in the same series, Healing Yoga for Common Conditions.  A sample of the video is above courtesy of YouTube.

This video is a low key yoga session that is meant to help promote general healing.  It is meant for someone with a full range of physical motion though it’s definitely not meant for someone who is already strong and well versed in yoga.  The session gave my lower back a great workout as well as my upper legs and upper arms as it included sun salutations, downward facing dog, warrior pose, lunges, twists and more.   It was honestly a bit more than I can physically handle at this point, but I knew to stop when my body was not able to go further so that I didn’t injure myself. 

The narrative focuses on healing, and the positive attitude it shares is really uplifting.  The narrators ask the user to work toward their best, and frequently remind us of the importance of incremental improvement.  There’s no judgment, and there’s no urging to push one’s self too far or too fast. It’s a compassionate approach to sharing yoga and healing.

I only had a few critiques of the video.  The instructors are both in fabulous physical shape, so they don’t present accommodations for some of the asanas that are difficult for someone with extra body fat.  Those would have been helpful for me.  As with the other video of theirs I reviewed, I wish there was more music at the end for additional meditation, though this is rectified by keeping a music player nearby to turn on after the video ends.  The music that was playing during shavasana had water running, and that is one of my pet peeves about relaxation music:  For many women, myself included, running water makes us want to pee.  It’s not relaxing!

This video is available on Ebay and Amazon through independent retailers.  It may also be available in local libraries.  Several of the Matkins’ other videos are also available on YouTube, too.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance

 (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.)

My introduction to yoga came when I was pregnant with my first baby.  My midwife asserted that the women who took yoga classes did the best during labor; that was enough to motivate me to sign up for really wonderful hatha prenatal yoga classes with a fabulous instructor.  I loved yoga and did it through my twin pregnancy as well as some postpartum yoga.   And my midwife was right:  The techniques I learned in prenatal yoga were fare more useful for me during labor than those I learned in my Bradley childbirth class.

More recently in my life as I was trying to raise myself up out of my chronic illness, my chiropractor started encouraging me to meditate daily.  I was open to the idea, so one day I laid down in shavasana and tried.  I couldn’t do it.  The only thing I could think was, “I need to do yoga first before I can do this.”  So I found the video reviewed here on Netflix streaming (no longer available), and I began.  I was quite pleased with what I had found in this video that was at exactly the right level for me and my physical restrictions.  My chiropractor was thrilled that I had not only begun meditating but had gone back to yoga as well.  He didn’t mean to accomplish quite so much in one try!

The video I discovered was Healing Yoga for Aches and Pains by Lisa Bennet Matkin and Charles Matkin.  In addition to currently being available for short term rental on Amazon Instant Video, the cheapest place I found it for purchase on the web is Target.  There are also more expensive copies on Amazon and Ebay. 

The video is designed for individuals with mobility impairment.  It presents some very common yoga asanas (positions) that have been adapted to make them easier for someone who is physically weak or in pain.  One does need to be able to stand, sit, and lay on the floor, or you could skip that particular section if you can't get into those positions.  A yoga mat is recommended but not required; one also needs a chair to work with, though I’ve used the footboard on my bed for parts of it.   Many times the instructors in the video refer to people with arthritis, but I think the video is great for fibromyalgia or Lyme, both of which I have.   The video is really low key and isn’t suitable for someone who is in prime physical condition, but for those of us with limitations, it can be perfect.

If you have never done yoga before, I’d recommend starting with a private tutor or classes before using a video; then you can use the video instead of or to supplement classes.  I recommend starting with an instructor so that you can learn how the positions are supposed to work so that you don’t hurt yourself.  Yoga may look easy, but it’s actually quite strenuous at times, and it is possible to hurt yourself.  Case in point:  The first time I watched this video, I went into a lunge, something I could easily do when I was healthy.  A split second after I started the asana, I had the thought, “My knees can’t handle this,” and I collapsed to the floor as one of my knees gave out.  Fortunately, it wasn’t anything my chiropractor couldn’t fix easily, but it illustrates my point.  If you’ve got a particular weakness in your body, learning the dangers first is really important to preventing injury.

My only complaint about the video is that the shavasana (or relaxation) at the end is way too short.  I’d like to have at least 15-20 minutes of instrumental music available at the end to extend my meditation period.  I’ve worked around this by hitting pause on the DVD and hitting play on a music machine (iPod, CD player, etc.) of some sort that I have sitting nearby.

One of the advantages to doing a yoga video at home is the that the hotter I get, the more I can just take off clothes.  While there is an all-male naked yoga studio in Austin, that’s not really my thing for many reasons!  If I’m stripping, I want to be in the privacy of my own home.  The video also allows me to pause it if I need a break or if I need to go to the bathroom.  I can start whenever I feel up to it, and I can stop when my body says it’s done.  While it doesn’t have the benefit of socialization with others and the added instructor guidance, for someone who is homebound and disabled, this video offers a way to partake in yoga.

© 2014 Green Heart Guidance