In this book, I share the top 7 strategies for our body, our mind/emotions and our spirit respectively that I used to help piece what I call my healing puzzle together to regain my quality of health from being deathly ill from Crohn’s Disease. It is designed to help others suffering from Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis to improve and optimize their quality of health and vibrancy in a more streamlined faster way than it took me. The strategies are simple and easy to follow (action suggestions are offered for each strategy).
Category: BooksHave you ever been told your condition is hopeless or incurable? Well, about twenty-five years ago I was, when I was diagnosed with Crohn's disease. At some point when I was near death weighing 90 pounds, I stopped believing this story the medical community told me and created my own with a happier ending. Now I am in my early fifties and in the best shape of my life enjoying a radiant state of health.
This guide is designed to help you discover, like I did, how to take control of your life, especially in the areas of mind, body, spiritual health and well-being, which play a significant role in our path to disease (or as I call it, dis-ease). Unrest of the mind, emotions and spirit come first. It's when we fail to deal with them that disease manifests in our bodies, usually in an area where we are susceptible both genetically and emotionally. Each emotion is linked to a specific organ, such as worry for the digestive organ system, particularly the stomach and spleen according to Eastern Medicine.
Unfortunately, when we're born, we don't receive a manual on how to take care of our bodies, deal with our emotions and stay spiritually connected. In the absence of proper teachings, we tend to develop, and are frequently given dysfunctional disease causing habits by others who didn't get the instructional course of life either. So, we go from being bright, radiant and shining lights of love, happiness and (usually) health to becoming dull, not so happy or healthy and stressed. The information presented in this first series is based on my research and personal experiences of healing from a chronic autoimmune illness of the intestinal tract, called Crohn's Disease. This is considered incurable in the traditional diseasefocused, symptom treating model of medicine. Traditional medicine mainly has only medications to suppress symptoms, and surgery to cut things out, in its toolbox for chronic illnesses. Instead of restoring one back to health, that model creates a vicious cycle of further illness and undesired side effects. On the other hand, I must put a disclaimer in this guide that this is not actual medical advice nor is it intended to tell you not to seek medical attention. When we have an acute immediate issue, our healthcare system is very useful and in those instances medicine and/or surgery may be exactly what is needed. However, in the long-term chronic setting, these tactics most often create more problems than they solve. This is my personal experience, as well as my observations of other people in my life, both personally and professionally. Also, I can't guarantee results. Ultimately it is up to you to put in the effort and dedication to putting together the pieces that work for you. I can lead you to the water, so to speak, but I can't make you drink it or believe it. That is the free will bestowed upon us in life allowing us to make choices for ourselves.
Getting back to my journey, I was able to reclaim my health by choosing to no longer sit passively on the sidelines by just blindly following what I was told by the medical profession. Instead, I became an active participant by regaining control of the driver's seat of my life. My turnaround started when the gastroenterologists wanted to give me an immunosuppressive drug to shut off my overactive immune system. This, the doctors informed me, would leave me so vulnerable that a cold could turn into deadly pneumonia, because I would have no defense system. Incidentally, my old college roommate recently informed me how her son, who has Crohn's, developed bone marrow cancer from taking the current prescribed immunosuppressive drug of choice. I was already in a severely weakened state at that time, weighing only 90 pounds as I mentioned before, and my life's radiance was all but gone.
A strong wind could've done me in, so taking such a harsh medication seemed way too extreme and scary. It was then that I had my epiphany -- I stopped buying into this incurable disease philosophy, and began firmly believing in a way back to health. It occurred to me to think of it as simply solving a puzzle. One puzzle got me ill, so another puzzle had to get me better. All I had to do was fill in the right pieces. By using a lot of trial and error, and researching a plethora of techniques, I finally found those pieces that were the best fit for my health puzzle.
By sharing what I learned and condensing it into this guide book, it is my intention to help you more easily streamline your ability to strategize and find the pieces you need to complete your picture of radiant health. Thereby, hopefully, saving you much of the time and effort that it took me. However, your optimal health and vitality puzzle may not look exactly like mine. As humans we have many similarities collectively, yet we are also uniquely different as individuals, so not all the pieces we need will be the same. However, this guide gives a good starting point and foundation from which to begin putting your puzzle together.
Therefore, use only the things that work for you. Keep in mind that these strategies I share usually must work in combination rather than isolation. You must have enough pieces filled in for them to synergize and work. Sometimes the only part of a strategy described may work for you. I love the saying, "Keep the best and forget the rest." By learning to listen to your body, you will begin to decipher the techniques that aren't working and eliminate them. Also, keep in mind that enough time needs to be given to see if something will be effective for you or not. In addition, we tend to immediately reject things that we sometimes need the most because it's not always easy to look at ourselves squarely in the mirror.
