First of all, I want you to know healing your body is possible. If you’re in chronic pain, have chronic fatigue, have injuries and issues, I want you to know there is hope. Today I’m going to be going over how I rebuilt my body after partially tearing my MCL and ACL, having two herniated discs, having severe whiplash, and a concussion.

This happened about 10 years ago, I was in two consecutive accidents. Back-to-back within a three month period, and I’ve struggled with a lot of severe body issues.

I was diagnosed with PTSD and also had so much anxiety after my accidents. To make it all worse, I gained a lot of weight. I had about 30 more pounds on my frame. I’m a pretty petite little person, so it was a lot of weight for me.

I’ve dealt with years of chronic pain and having a lot of issues with my digestion. I was diagnosed with IBS, irritable bowel syndrome. I was almost scared to eat because every single time I ate I would get bloated, have gas, and tons of stomach pain. I had a lot of other issues as well. It was like this perfect storm.

When unfortunate events happen like this, you can’t stay down. I want to share with you what I did to get on top of my issues. What I did to get that next level of healing to be able to integrate and to move on.

I’m going to go over a few high level things that you can think about. Especially if you’re dealing with chronic pain, disease state, or having issues in your life. We have to have strategies around these issues.

#1. Mindset. This is so important and something that, a lot of times, we’ll bypass. We’ll get caught in what I call the vicious cycle. We’ll be looping and going over and over things. We’ll be in this negative-triggered mindset. We really have to learn strategies on being able to get on top of that and to release emotional baggage.

I know for me, I experience a lot of anger, sadness, fear, even shame and guilt around being injured and having to do deal with my disease state. I had to learn these strategies on how to focus in and to be able to move forward. I had to have these step-by-step strategies so that I’m able to get on top of things and not be distracted or taken off my path.

The most important thing to start with is to have the correct mindset, belief systems, and values. Everything being supported to move forward to healing so that we’re not getting triggered or not getting into these negative things. 

#2. The relationship you have to your disease state or pain. This was a huge shift for me. I was super reactive whenever I was in pain. Most of the time my pain was either a seven, eight, or nine on a scale of one to ten. I let the pain control my life.

I remember realizing this. I remember that I could breathe and I could respond versus react to it. I started working with the pain versus against it. The more anger and frustration I had, the more pain I would have because it would create more tension and constriction in the body.

We want to create flow and this dilation in the body. I had to shift that relationship with the pain. I go through so many strategies on my website and then in my online programs. This is one of the most important strategies I can teach you.

A thing within this, working on the relationship with pain is breath management. Part of my journey of getting over my PTSD was taking three years of voice work. I basically couldn’t talk in front of anyone. I such bad anxiety that I would shut down. I had bad brain fog and memory issues. It’s like I couldn’t function and I couldn’t speak in front of people. That’s why I took three years of voice work. A big part of voice work, learning meditation, and slowing everything down was learning how to breathe properly.

I was in so much trauma and had so much anxiety, I was breathing so much from my chest and my throat. This was really not helping my pain, my nervous system, and my 11 systems of the body.

I learned techniques of how to bring the breath down into the belly and to have what I call a 360 degree breath. I learned to breathe into our lungs that are in our back and to also elongate the exhale. This is important, especially if you’re dealing with chronic pain.

This helps stimulate the parasympathetic nervous system, which calms us down. So, learning and looking at what you have control over. When you break it down, you have control over your breath. What are your choices every single moment? Are you going to respond or react? How are you breathing? You have to start breaking down to the small things.

#3. Celebrating the small stuff. This was a huge shift in me as well in my healing journey. Part of my issue was that I was constantly comparing myself to how I was before. I was comparing myself to other people. I remember when I started shifting this. I started taking one day at a time and just checking in where am I today.

I also remember the day that I walked one block without pain. That night, instead of being hard on myself, I was like, “Oh, that was really good. I’m going to do two blocks by next week.” I started being more of a cheerleader for myself versus being hard on myself. I start celebrating those small things.

#4. Anti-inflammatory diet and non-impact fitness. Within diet, people don’t realize that stress and pain causes inflammation.

When our blood sugar’s up and down and we’re eating foods that are refined, toxic, and pollutants, we’re all over the place. This causes inflammation.

We have to work with the body versus against it. We have to learning what it is to have an anti-inflammatory diet and seeing if you have certain things like sensitivities or allergies. These sensitivities and allergies could be from  gluten, dairy, nuts, soy, eggs. Those are just some common ones.

It’s something that I love to go into detail about. I think it’s so important because I was such a sugaroholic beforehand. I was eating all these foods that were not helping my mood and putting me out of balance.

As for non-impact fitness, I got into things like tai chi, qi gong, and yoga. Also walking and being able to build from that. Looking at those beginning steps and not going right into these crazy workouts or thinking that you have to be like that overnight. Even if I had a flare-up, I knew the strategies where I’d have to go to start building to get going, and so I wasn’t just in that spot for a long time.

Another thing is advance body work. Finding people that know how to release the fascia and the tension in the body. When we have pain in the body or we’re dealing with disease states, the fascia and the tissues, it does these holding patterns and you clench up. It’s almost like a spiral. It’s learning how to unravel from that and looking at strategies. You’ve have to learn strategies that work for you, and you have to master them.

I’m not in that mindset that everything’s going to always be perfect in life. Things are not going to be easy. It’s like things happen all the time. But I have a choice on how I want to handle it. If I’m going to respond versus react, and then start taking action and doing strategy, little things to resolve it. To learn from it and just move on from it.

These are just a few things, and there’s so much more here. I’m sure I’ll make more articles about this!

Do you deal with pain or body issues on a daily basis? If so, let me know comments. I want to help you the best that I can!