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Announcing The 2014 Phoenix Fire Academy
This is a love letter. To you who’s been diagnosed. Has struggled with long standing illness. Whose obstacles are dictating your limits, and whose true and purest potential has been hemmed in. This is an invitation. To you, whose old life has been burned away by adversity. You, who has a fire smouldering at your centre. A hunger for a new way. A new beginning. To take your diagnoses and hardships and turn them into something else. Something different. Something abundant. Something better. This is that opportunity. A turning point. Disability doesn’t mean isolation and fear. Diagnosis doesn’t mean the end of joy, fun, ease and freedom. Your challenges can be…
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Living Well With Fatigue
Do you consistently have enough energy? No? You aren’t alone. And while this isn’t a bulleted, 10-point-quick-fix article full of ginseng and grandiose promises, it is one neatly packed with valuable concepts to add some pep to your step. These thoughtful approaches have helped me live well, with fatigue and chronic illness for over 10 years, while earning a degree and building two thriving businesses. Living with illness that features symptomatic fatigue often leaves me too exhausted to sit up or turn over in bed. That same exhaustion may also have me regard basic tasks with a humdrum eye, “I don’t feel up to doing that right now…maybe I’ll try later…
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Relaxation Rehabilitation Part Four: How to Rest and Make it Fun
Lying down and doing nothing can be what is needed but sometimes our brains feel like they are racing and we need a gentle activity. Here are some suggestions: 1. Sanctuary. Imagine an inner safe place where you can go and feel calm, go there now. 2. Senses. Use relaxing sensory experiences. What is relaxation to you? What invokes relaxation and the sensation of ease? It could be falling asleep,the knowledge of nothing to do, a massage, a hug, a warm bath, the smell of clean linen, candle light, the sea and the beach. whatever it is for you, create or invoke it to relax today. Use smell, taste, colour and imagery.…
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Relaxation Rehabilitation Part Three: Solutions for Resting Problems
* When you struggle to switch your mind off try using mindfulness techniques. Observe the thoughts, the desires, the intense need to sit up and write something down or just look at that. Watch the flood of emotions, guilt, frustration, fear, unworthiness all come up and pass away. Let it all happen. It’s not you, you are the space in between the thoughts. * When you stick with it, the thoughts and tension begin to ease. At the beginning it can be very painful as the secondary tension related pain in the muscles releases. This passes and blood flows more easily. Remember in this difficult moment, you are helping your…
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Relaxation Rehabilitation Part Two: The Great Big Fear
Illness can be uncomfortable and messy. Rest can seem boring. Before I reframed my thinking, when I was resting I felt sick. I had to rest, I could not carry on with whatever activity I was doing. I came face to face with the reality of the sickness. We get scared, and we are scared of losing dignity, life, hope, purpose, independence, and respect. And yet we are overcoming that fear every day we live with illness, or that we live as a survivor of illness. We are so much more, because of overcoming all this; not less. The fact that we are still managing to keep on even with…
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