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Guide to Painful Periods: Claiming The Power In Your Reproductive Healing
Listen to your womb, cervix, uterus, ovaries, belly. Do you hear them? They are places of deep power, often neglected, but with such profound lessons to teach. To contribute to your wholeness. To help you heal. So long as you are willing to connect to the parts of yourself that are hurting and listen to what they have to say. Some raw food literature suggests menstruation is the body’s way of detoxing, that if detoxed enough, menstruation will naturally cease. That amenorrhoea due to low weight is actually a sign of raw food and detox success. Our reproductive organs are powerful, dark, creative spaces. So often they are viewed negatively;…
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Loving My Body: An Act of Resistance
I had a realisation in yoga recently, while I was struggling into a pose my newly numbed limbs couldn’t quite reach: I love my body. It doesn’t have to work the right way for me to love it. It doesn’t have to look a certain way. I will love my body and take care of it. I love myself, in fact. Always and always. And I love you, wherever you are in your journey with your body too. However, I have, sadly, spent many years acting like this wasn’t the case, and pushing my beautiful body to go further than she could. I’ve been angry at my perceived ‘failures’, and…
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In Defense of Doing Nothing
I feel it too, the passing of time. The frustration of physical limits. Mounting achievements by your friends and loved ones, when simply getting out of bed feels like climbing a mountain to you. I know you want all those good things – love, joy, fulfilment, achievement and that’s why on any good day, in any space, reprieve or opportunity you get, you launch. It feels like you haven’t got the luxury of slow-and-steady so you run at life in any moment you can, pushing, pushing, pushing to achieve those long held goals. Doing is an addiction. (Click to Tweet!) When we are doing we feel momentum, we feel like…
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Accessible Enjoyment: How to Create Joy Everyday (Bad Days Included)
Disability and fun can seem incompatible. How can you have fun when you are stuck in bed all day (and not in a good way)? What ways are there to laugh and smile when you are preoccupied with pacing, worrying about benefits, dealing with all the well-intended recommendations to drink more water/eat healthily/try chia seeds and oh yes, the actual chronic illness you are living with every single day? It’s hard, I know. I really do know as I’ve lived with chronic illness for the last thirteen years. But I’ve also danced in firelight on the beach at sunset, shared my heart on stage with hundreds of people, groomed the horses in milky December light,…
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Illness Etiquette: What People CAN Say…
In many illness support groups everyone talks of all the silly things people say to those with illness and disability… :: Will you ever walk again? (Hi, I don’t believe we’ve been introduced, I’m Grace, how do you do?) :: Isn’t it funny. So funny, bodies, aren’t they? (Not wildly, no) :: I wonder when they will find a cure? (I’ve no idea, and in the mean time please don’t report to me what you read in some random health bulletin, it’s not helpful and it’s boring) :: Aren’t you brave? (No. Fighter pilots, yes. Firefighters, yes. Mahatma Ghandi, yes. Me, no) :: What did you do to yourself then? (Would you believe me if I told you…
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