When it comes to living well with chronic illness, here are three essential practices that don’t get enough air time:

1. Seeing ourselves in the collective context

2. Cultivating and consulting our intuition  

3. Fostering connection

3.5 Making friends with our nervous systems*

* This is "3.5" because it IS getting talked about, just not enough.

1. Context - Most conversations about healing health challenges (chronic or otherwise) are very focused on what we can do as individuals to make our bodies feel better. We largely aren't talking about why so many of us are sick. We are sick because our society is set up to value profit and power over human, animal, and earthly wellbeing. Since the norm = illness, we have to be non-normative in our approach to healing. We must resist the forces that are harming our bodies and do our own work to deprogram the capitalist, ableist, white supremacist, patriarchal, etc. social programming that lives in our cells, so we can interrupt intergenerational cycles of harm. That deprogramming work needs to be part of any physical healing journey. 

2. Intuition - One of the #1 most valuable tools I've acquired in my healing journey is honing my intuition. When we stop looking outward and turn our attention inward, we get all the information we need, including learning when we need to look for more information or a different kind of support. Our body knows what we need. We just need to be able to ask and listen. Trauma and conditioning separates us from our intuition so this is challenging for most people living on Turtle Island. It takes time, but it's worth the investment. This is a big area of focus with most of my clients and there's a whole chapter on it in Rebel Healing. 

3. Connection - Resisting hyper individualism and reconnecting with other humans, ourselves, the earth, ancestors, and the divine, is critical in successful healing. We cannot get through the hard times or sustain wellbeing without it. In order to connect well with other humans, we need some of these other points of connection too. Humans will let us down, our bodies might disappoint us, but if we are also connected with rocks, trees, and the spirits of our great grandparents, we can still feel that we are not alone. 

3.5 Making Friends With Your Nervous System - In 1994, psychologist and neuroscientist Stephen Porges introduced Polyvagal Theory to provide a framework for how the nervous system works and what puts us in different physiological states of social engagement, fight/flight, shutdown/collapse, etc. When you understand how the nervous system works, you can start to track your own physiological state moment to moment. You can also learn tools for getting yourself into more regulated states when you notice you're dysregulated. Because the nervous system regulates so many critical bodily processes, the more time you spend in a more regulated state, the more easily your body can unwind patterns of dysfunction that cause pain and disease and actually repair itself. You can support yourself and people in your community by practicing co-regulation through singing, dancing, laughing together, playing games, humming or mirroring each other. In this so-called "Post-Pandemic" time, most of us are still struggling with dysregulation, so investing in co-regulating activities can be a huge contribution to you and those around you. 

Learn more about all of the above in my upcoming book, Rebel Healing: Transforming Ourselves and Systems That Make Us Sick, coming out 9/19/23. Sign up to be an early reader here. 

Photo by Chang Duong on Unsplash