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I haven’t talked about the specifics of this much, but I’ve struggled immensely with my health for the past 4.5 years.
During this time, I’ve been diagnosed with:
Chronic fatigue syndrome
GERD
Parasites
Lyme
Mold
Long Covid
Vaccine injury
Disc herniation / impinged nerves
Thoracic outlet syndrome
Dystonia
Chronic laryngitis
SIBO
TMJ
Systemic inflammation
I’ve also seen many alternative health practitioners, healers, and medical intuitives who have given me other explanations for my challenges:
Kundalini syndrome
Ayurvedic imbalances
Qi blockages / imbalance
Entity possession
Psychosomatic / suppressed emotions
This has been exhausting, confusing, and wildly expensive.
Here’s a recent pic of me doing bio-magnetic therapy in Austin. I have about 40 magnets on my body!
Last week I was diagnosed with CIRS (Chronic Inflammatory Response Syndrome).
CIRS isn’t formally recognized by the CDC or mainstream medicine, but it’s fairly well known in the chronic illness community.
The idea is that, due to genetic predispositions, your body can’t clear certain biotoxins. This causes your immune system to be perpetually activated, resulting in chronic inflammation which wreaks downstream havoc across multiple systems in the body.
This tracks with many of the symptoms I’ve dealt with – extreme fatigue, constant pain, brain fog, memory loss, shortness of breath, heart palpitations, temperature dysregulation, nerve pain, numbness in my arms and legs, stomach pain, insomnia, and incredible anxiety.
The crazy thing is that five years ago I was the healthiest person I knew. And despite eating a spartan diet, exercising 5+ days a week, diligently tracking my biomarkers, and even spending 1000’s of hours doing trauma healing work, my health has gone to shit.
Navigating all this has easily been the most difficult thing of my life.
Many days I haven’t been able to do basic things like work, engage in social activites, or watch my daughter. The physical pain or intensity of my fatigue is just too much.
For the first few years of this, I resisted that this was my reality immensely and was extremely angry about it. It felt like the prime of my life had been taken away from me and I didn’t know why.
Why do things like this happen? Is it just shit luck?
Maybe you’re going through chronic health issues. Or maybe it’s something else that has been extremely debilitating.
I wanted to share a perspective that has increasingly helped me find meaning, acceptance, and compassion through all of this.
Imagine you have a shape that represents the level of well-being of all aspects of your life. For the average person, it might look like this.
Before you’re on a consciousness journey, your life is mostly oriented around trying to grow and improve these external factors through applying yourself.
Most people generally keep doing this as long as it seems to be working for them. There’s not impetus to behave differently.
But at some point, this strategy may stop working.
This happened to me when I turned 30.
No matter how hard I tried and cleverly I maneuvered, things stopped going well – including my physical health. This led me down a path that eventually made me begin to prioritize my inner world.
Even though my inner terrain increasingly became the focus and was viewed as a more primary way to cultivate well-being, I still wanted to thrive externally. It’s why I was so frustrated that things felt very challenging.
A few years into this, my teacher and many of the books I was reading began to point to the same thing…
A higher aspect of myself (my true Self or soul) had a slightly different prerogative than crushing it on all aspects of life. Its priority was the evolution of my consciousness. It acheived this through expanding my awareness and transformation to restore its natural qualities.
Using the shape analogy, its prerogative looks closer to this.
The thing is, the path to restoring and expanding these virtues is typically markedly different from growing your external well-being – at least in the beginning.