Healing Series Part 1: Body Stress Release

In this healing series, I’ll explain the various healing practices that I’ve experienced and what I gained from them. I truly believe that in taking an active role in healing myself that I have sped up my recovery. Today’s topic is called Body Stress Release, or BSR for short.

Even before I became ill I met a wonderful lady called Lourentia at a business networking breakfast. I have since abandoned the networking breakfasts but it was a real blessing to meet such a quality person. I have been going to her sporadically for many years and at stressful times, ironically, I scaled back on the visits. After my diagnosis of my stress-induced auto-immune disease, I started going for BSR again.

Lourentia asks me each time where I feel discomfort or pain in my body. In the past I’d have aches and pains due to running injuries or stiffness. Since my diagnosis, I usually just feel tired, and not surprisingly have a lot of tension in my neck and shoulders. So I tell her all the areas that ail me so that she knows where to focus her efforts.

I take off only my shoes and then lie face down on a treatment table, much like the ones used for massage. I can breathe through the hole in the table my feet must dangle off the edge of the table. Lourentia then begins her treatment by putting her hands onto my back. She gets a feel of where the body needs work and goes ahead with the treatment. You are required to turn onto your back midway during the treatment in order to access all parts of the body. 

Just as the name suggests, the premise of BSR is to release, by small touches to pressure points, the stress that is trapped in various parts of the body. The practitioner tests for stress in many areas of the body and then works to release it. They use the feet as a means to monitor the effects of what they implement. I feel sensations in my body as Lourentia performs the releases, almost like a little ripple of something travelling up my spine or down my legs. Sometimes the pressure needs to be quite hard and the points can be quite tender but overall it is a very pleasant experience and something that has helped me a great deal.

Being an ultra-marathon runner I have a strong belief in the mind-body connection as it is very clear that your mind tides you through the end of a tough race. This connection has been even more evident to me this year as I’ve understood how stress has caused my body to turn on itself. Thankfully I am in remission now and the feedback from Lourentia also points to a much greater recovery since last year.

There are many ways in which BSR can help improve your overall health such as better posture, released tension in the neck, shoulders and back and even things like sinus. There are no side effects and it is a non-invasive treatment. I have benefited from BSR in treating a variety of ailments but in current times, to diminish the stress held in my body, particularly neck and shoulders. It must be said that with the many healing experiences I'm undergoing, it's difficult to attribute improvement to one discipline but overall, my sinus is not nearly as bad as it usually is during winter and my immune system is getting stronger. 

If you are interested, you can read more about Body Stress Release here: http://www.bodystressrelease.com/home/3

Alternative Medicine – Homeopathy

I had always been quite suspicious about alternative healing practices and practitioners until 2012. I was the mother of a three month old baby and as expected was sleep-deprived and pretty stressed. Labour law in our country specifies that mothers are entitled to four months of maternity leave, paid or unpaid. I was working in our ‘family’ business at that time and as a business owner, there’s really no such thing as maternity leave. I recall having meetings at my house feeling so frazzled that it was difficult to concentrate. I had to issue instructions from my home office and keep up to pace with client requests and insubordination from a staff member who challenged my decisions to modernise the business.

After three months, I went back to work, despite being highly emotional about leaving my tiny baby at a preschool. I elected to work half days for the first two weeks so that I could manage with the discomfort of feeding and to ensure my baby adjusted to the new routine. On 1 February 2012, my first full day back at work, I had a cold and was feeling awful. I didn’t feel justified in staying home, given the fact that customer billing was due in the first few days of the month. Mid-morning an irate family member attacked the office with a hammer and a screwdriver as a result of a marital dispute.

Being the only person of authority around, I had to confront her to try to calm the situation down and to mitigate the damage to the business. Furniture was thrown around, computers smashed, signage ripped off the front gate, pot plants tipped over and various places smashed with the hammer. When I confronted her I was verbally abused and the hammer was smashed against the wall within a metre from my head. By the wild look in her eye, I was concerned about not surviving the day or being permanently brain damaged. I thought of my little baby and how my husband would manage with our two kids in the event of my death or disability. The violence of the situation was truly a traumatic event, at a time when I was already fragile.

For the six months or so that followed the event, I had a series of colds and flu that hit me with regularity that was disturbing. I picked up every conceivable virus that came my way due to exposure from a little child at preschool and a weakened immune system. I literally had a few days in between illnesses where I was OK and then I would get sick again. I was obviously under a great deal of stress in dealing with the situation itself and the aftermath in the office.

I had regularly visited a chiropractor to assist with my minor running injuries and alignment. I went to see her for the tension in my neck and shoulders as a result of the stress. I had told her about the traumatic event that I experienced and I was telling her all about my susceptibility to colds and flu while she treated me. She suggested that I might have adrenal fatigue and recommended that I visit a homeopath.

"Adrenal fatigue is a collection of signs and symptoms, known as a syndrome, that results when the adrenal glands function below the necessary level. Most commonly associated with intense or prolonged stress."

The adrenal glands on top of the kidneys are part of the endocrine system and they secrete adrenaline as part of the body’s response to stress. This article discusses the fight or flight response: http://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/emotions/fear2.htm Part of this response to stress is to shut down the immune system in order to deal with the immediate danger.

I was sceptical about homeopathy but interested in her evaluation of my health and how she could treat me. She felt my pulse and looked at my tongue, punctuated with writing a few strange symbols on her notepad. She confirmed that I had adrenal fatigue and provided me with medication to treat it. I spent months treating the condition and slowly started to improve enough to resume running.

I had been to my standard doctor many times and the treatment for each cold focussed on only the one incidence and merely on the symptoms, not the underlying cause. As much as I think western medicine is important and cannot be abandoned, I had discovered a solution and was being treated holistically for the first time.It is no surprise for me that a diagnosis of Graves’ disease is a malfunction of the endocrine system, also where the adrenals fall, and an auto-immune disease initiated by stress. I had been heading towards the diagnosis this year even as far back as 2012.

I’m open to new experiences and I find them energising.  With such a serious diagnosis I have been more than willing to investigate and explore as many alternative healing practices as I can. I have found some treatments more effective for me personally than others but I believe it is a matter of what resonates with you and also what ails you. In the coming weeks I’ll be doing a series on healing practices to share my experiences.

Particularly for the sceptics, you may get a kick out of this fun clip poking fun at homeopathy.  

Exercise and Well-Being

Something I’ve been grappling with lately is that I can’t really exercise. I can’t exercise like I’m used to – running about five days a week and training for big scary goals. Currently, I can’t even walk up a steep hill without feeling exhausted. I’m now one of those people who will circle the parking lot, looking for the closest spot near the entrance.  To the average bystander, I just look lazy.

I’m used to being fit and I’m used to my weight being fairly static. Now, I’m deliberately slowing down my metabolism with medication and I can’t exercise. It’s not that I’m just feeling the symptoms of Graves’ disease, being fatigue. I’m totally and utterly depleted from stress. When your body has invoked an auto-immune attack, you have to rebuild your energy reserves and change your life to prevent a relapse. It is not a matter of weeks or days to recover from something this serious. And it's not just a matter of forging through the fatigue - I can set my recovery back if I'm not careful. 

I often encounter people who work with athletes and their advice seems to be quite wrong to me: they are advising me to do a 40 minute cycle when five minutes flattens me. Because I look fine and I can hold a conversation, people just don’t understand just how depleted one gets from a stress-induced illness. This is not laziness and this is not me being over-dramatic. If I was prone to drama, I would not have become so depleted in the first place because people would have listened!

Even if I were able to stay on the bike for 40 minutes, I would feel the impact of that for days if not weeks afterwards. I recently had a spike of stress again and it set me back about a week. I felt my immune system dipping and was even advised by medical practitioners to up my Vitamin C dosage. So an intense cardio work-out is not what I need now.

I've tried going for a gentle walk and that works quite well. I found spots in my neighbourhood where I can rest on a bench if I get a little tired. I've also been doing ball exercises for various muscle groups but mainly core strength. I have been doing a cycle of ball exercises, walking and the five minute cycle once a week each. In the week where I had more stress, I had to stop all exercise again.

I have been pretty patient by my standards in not getting too uptight about gaining weight. Over the past few years and months I have given up alcohol, caffeine, carbonated drinks and am eating more of the things that are healthier. I was a healthy eater to start with, so there was not that much refining that could be done. I do feel very sorry for myself that I cannot control my weight, even though I'm eating well. The one weakness I do have is sugar, primarily chocolate. I feel that I have really done so much to work towards healing and recovery that I really deserve just one indulgence. 

For someone who used to say ‘my biggest health problem is sinus’, this is quite a different landscape. And I do find it enormously frustrating. I’m a person of action. I like to get things done, take ownership and put plans in place. For me to reign in exercise to this degree after being idle for months, is actually very hard. Sadly, even my fat pants are now becoming tight. I don't fancy buying a new wardrobe for my expanding physique so something must be done. 

In the reading and research I have done, I have noticed how much yoga comes up as a healing form of exercise. I have previously done the 90 minute gruelling sessions of Bikram yoga in a sauna environment, as it was at my level of intensity. Now, I think it would kill me. But I have resolved to try restorative yoga this week to dip my toe in the water.

I remember getting advice from Bio-Kinetics I was attending that the yoga was not at all compatible with running. The statement she used was ‘you don’t see any people from India winning marathons’. I was quite sad to have to give up yoga as I really enjoyed the intensity, the progress I was making and how great I felt afterwards. Perhaps this is my chance to improve my flexibility and to invest in a new regime of exercise that is health-building.