Tag: Fibromyalgia

Getting Things Done

Achieving Goals, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Sometimes I have what they call fibro fog where it can be difficult to collect thoughts and think things through as easily as I normally would, which means ways that I might normally get things done don’t work. Essentially, relying on my memory falls down when the fibro fog appears.

This led me to thinking about how we each deal with things differently. Some of us are planners and need a bullet point plan before starting and some of us jump right in and figure it out along the way. There is no one right way of doing it because we each have different personalities and different challenges to face.

My advice would be to find a way that works for you by trying out different approaches to getting things done, both in your personal and professional lives. I intend to develop a fall back plan that relies on checklists and priorities that give me structure when the fibro fog appears.

I feel this approach suits me well overall as well, so I’ll give it a try and adjust as needed moving forward. I suggest you pick an approach and try it too. You can always adjust it or change it if it doesn’t work, but make sure you try it for a good few weeks before deciding if it works for you or not.

What Can You Tolerate?

Happiness, Health, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Having Fibromyalgia, as I do, my threshold for pain and patience have changed. Over time my skin has become extremely sensitive to cold, so much so that cold water feels like hot oil when it touches my skin. On the flip side, having chronic pain means that pain becomes an everyday experience, therefore it becomes kind of normal, so the amount pain that I can tolerate and carry on with my daily activities has increased. But when I am fatigued and in pain my level of patience can drop drastically.

This got me thinking about the experiences we have and the level of tolerance we have for different things. Experiences that cause anxiety will greatly reduce what we can tolerate, but experiences that cause self-confidence or contentment will increase what we can tolerate.

Being someone who regularly meditates will certainly help increase our tolerance levels. It is worth having a look at what your day to day experience is and where your tolerance is with different things. Then look at how you can improve these through self-reflection, meditation or something like Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. This is on the path to self mastery.

Just Surrender

Happiness, Health, Success, The Pathway To Fulfilment

Watching this YouTube video reminded me of a dark time in my life and how I got myself out of it. I don’t often talk about personal things on this blog, but I believe this may help some if you, so it’s worth sharing. I may have even shared details of this before.

I spent nine years working in a special needs school and enjoyed it for the first five or so, but we began to get children with more challenging behaviours and physical restraints became more and more necessary. I also developed Fibromyalgia during this time, so the physical restraints became challenging for me.

I began to worry about losing my job, which was our main source of income and I was working with young people who had already given me concussion. I began getting anxiety pain in my chest and feeling stuck in a difficult situation.

One day walking home from the bus stop at the end of a day in the special needs school, I had had enough and I looked up at the sky and said in my head, “universe, I surrender to you. I will take your signs and follow them out of this situation.” I cried and felt relieved.

I found another job which had an annual salary £3000 less than I was on, but I followed my gut and changed jobs. Two months in to my new job the company increased the salary to about what I was on in my previous job. A union had been working with the company for two years to get the salary increased and I arrived when it did.

The point I am making is that sometimes you need to surrender to the universe or God or whatever your beliefs call the oneness that we are all in and look for the opportunities it/he/she provides. It can have a profound effect on your life and wellbeing. Your journey will doubtless be different from mine, but shared experience is often shared wisdom.

Choosing Hope

Happiness, Health

We often don’t believe something is possible, that we cannot achieve or do certain things. We have a diminished sense of hope. This belief, I would argue, is a choice, whether made consciously or not. Our life experiences, and the meanings we place on them, direct our thinking when it comes to our abilities.

However, every new experience changes how we understand and view our past experiences and our current selves. This process of new understanding can actually cause our memories to change, because what we remember is always held in our present mind, along with our understanding of it.

We might remember new details which change what we think happened or a change in our understanding of what happened can profoundly alter how we feel about these memories. For example, I have been living with Fibromyalgia for over ten years and for a long time it felt debilitating, with pain in my joints and muscles and feeling exhausted most of the time.

But, as is often the case, this struggle became something that led me to understanding how Chi (Qi), or energy, flows through our bodies and how Chi Kung (Qigong) gives us the ability to master our own Chi. It has put me on a path towards self mastery and a profound understanding that we are in fact our own saviours, we can heal ourselves, if we learn how. Hope very often rises like a phoenix from the ashes of the trauma and challenges in our lives. Hope has a power to transform how we look at ourselves and our circumstances.

As Maya Angelou said in her poem Still I Rise, 

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise

Suffering Is A Choice

Happiness, Success, The Fullfilment Framework

As someone who suffers from chronic pain, I can tell you that our mood and the way we see the pain, makes it worse or better. The pain is still the same, but it feels less intense or more intense depending on our level of focus on it.

I have Fibromyalgia and it causes nerve pain in my joints and muscle across my whole body. Some days are better than others. I’m beginning to master the art of pushing the pain into the background and getting on with my day. It is possible, through practice, for you to do the same.

There is another type of suffering, the psychological kind. We often get attached to things, experiences and people and when we lose them we suffer. It is right to become attached to the people in our lives, but being attached to things like our mobile phone, our car, or our designer wardrobe, means that when they get a tiny amount of damage we suffer.

The none attachment that many eastern religions talk about does not mean that we must get rid of everything we own and live in a monastery, it means we have the things we need, but we avoid becoming too attached to them. It means we own these things and they don’t own us.

We can become attached to pain too, both the physical and the mental kinds. We avoid change and cling on to that which is predictable. Often this is the pain of a broken heart or the judgement of others or simply chronic pain. However, if we freed ourselves and stepped into the future without clinging to such things, then life will be brighter and better than ever before.