I think I would safely claim that I have been aware of my body and it’s workings for the majority of my life. I think I’ve “heard” my body and made little notes to file away in the back of my mind on it’s inner workings, saving for rainy days or those little conversations with doctors when they run down the symptom list with you. “Do you ever feel radiating pain when ....”
But do I LISTEN to my body?
Do I take those notes I hear and adjust my routine to better care for the sack of flesh I’ve been assigned to in this life?
I haven’t been as good at that until recently. Most of my years were spent sweeping negative signals under the rug because I was busy doing “more important things.” Things like working way too many hours into the wee hours to meet deadlines, surviving on fast food while working those hours, working tirelessly to prove my worth to a company that didn’t really value what I was doing in the first place (so that was just out of alignment and guaranteed failure), and pedaling as fast as I could to try to live out both MY dream life and the life that was expected of me.
...Sounds fulfilling, right? (that was sarcasm)
As in most relationships, when one partner is ignored for too long, things boil to the surface and explode. Between 2017 and 2018 that’s pretty much what my body was doing—yelling so it would finally be listened to. It was tired, not properly fed, and ignored. And it started screaming.
It actually threw an introductory temper tantrum in 2013 when I was finally diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes after a few years of prediabetes warnings. I mean it was just barely over the line. Like baby diabetes. I “tried” to “fix it” on my own, without medications, for about 1.5-2 years but the numbers were creeping a little higher overall. And when I say I “tried” I’m really saying that I didn’t really change much and was starting to get depressed about it and work stress was even higher which, I found out later, contributed to the higher blood sugar numbers. I even saw a diabetes educator and nutritionist to try to understand what my body was doing and what I needed to do to fix it and – as wonderful as those ladies were – it just didn’t help me and their advice didn’t seem to make sense (keep drinking diet drinks, eat little meals all the time throughout the day…) Looking back, and knowing what I know now, it’s amazing I’m still alive and not already on dialysis based on the old school advice I received.
Eventually my doctor convinced me to try some medications out to keep my blood sugar more “controlled” so that I stayed in a range that would not cause organ damage. Because I obviously wasn’t getting there on my own. And thus began several years of crazy digestive issues, trial and error on several different drugs, and negative medication reactions—diarrhea, nausea, injection site reactions like big, red swollen spots about 6” in diameter. And I was still trying to live the stressful life, prove myself, and live up to that dream that was somebody else’s and not mine. All in between emergency runs to the bathroom and just plain feeling like crap (no pun intended).
In early 2017, I was at the Society for Marketing Professional Services Southern Regional Conference and attended a personal branding session presented by Cathy Hutchison. In the last year or so I had the chance to share with her that this session was probably the first step on my journey of awakening. In the session she shared ways for us as marketers and business developers to create a name for ourselves and use that to help our companies. I got home and immediately bought a domain name and began to think hard about who I am to my community and network and what I bring to the table.
A few months earlier in 2016, I had decided to start spending time doing things I actually loved instead of constantly working toward this dream career goal of someone else’s. I signed up for a permaculture design course (permaculture is “a design system for sustainable living”) and found a group of sustainability-loving, earth-loving, farm-and-garden-loving, whole-systems-approach-loving (holistic) people that for the first time made me feel I wasn’t the only crazy one out there. I was still working crazy hours in my other career job but I’d found a pocket of time to devote to wholesome living over the six months of this weekend course.
The permaculture course ended in March of 2017 and by June I was in a Beginner Farmers and Ranchers Holistic Management class with yet another group of like-minded kindred spirits—half of which were also in the permaculture class with me. These might have been even more “my people” since we focused a lot on animal grazing management which brings the land back to life (and sequesters carbon for those interested in climate change solutions) instead of depleting its resources. But the most important thing I learned here was not so much about ranching but about how to create a holistic mission, vision, and goal for not just a ranch, but for my entire life. I left that course and decided that three over-arching and summary goals for my life are to help people, help the planet, and live the life of my dreams. (There are more details beneath each of those but this will suffice for now.)
This opened up an awareness in me that my life was not in alignment.
It reminded me that I was living somebody else’s life day to day while dreaming of living my life in the future. “Someday.” And I began to think, “What am I waiting for? I’m not getting any younger. Time is fleeting. I need to take action.”
While that thought was an epiphany, I can’t say that immediately things changed. Breaking bad habits and turning your life in a 180 degree turn is scary and unpleasant and scary. And unpleasant. And very uncomfortable. And scary.
But the seeds of change were planted and I felt like I finally had a direction that was truly fulfilling my life dreams.
So we were talking about listening to our bodies…..So as I’m having all these mental epiphanies, and experiencing increasing levels of stress in my day job, and having to take all these medications that made me feel horrible, I developed some pretty severe anxiety. In 2018 it all hit the fan. In February of 2018 I had a devastating personal moment and my body and mind just couldn’t handle it. I had to call in to work because I could not stop crying and barely got out of bed for two days. The first day I at least did notice that something wasn’t right so I looked up counselors for the first time in my life. I knew I needed to talk to someone. And she was wonderful. I believe at first I visited her weekly for four weeks and then we pushed it back to every 2-4 weeks and then as needed. I think it was about 4-6 months total that I saw her. We talked about personal struggles, we discussed work. We talked about my dreams and how my current job was nowhere near fulfilling my dreams. She actually suggested that I could be good at Life Coaching and gave me information for the company that certified her. I decided to go ahead and do the 3-day weekend certification in August (several months later) just to see what it was about and possibly use the skills in my current career or to change careers and companies later.
While this brief relationship inspired me and gave me hope, I still had to deal with the stress at work. And I still wasn’t dealing with it well and was pretty clueless about HOW to deal with it other than “work less and exercise” which felt difficult to do with long hours and two hours of commuting every day. My anxiety had gotten so bad that I would very often feel physically sick by about 10:00 am – weakness in my arms, shoulders, and neck and a bit achy like I was getting a cold. But as soon as I’d get a few miles down the road, I’d feel fine again.
In early June of 2018, I had my turning point moment. One day when tensions were particularly high, I became so weak by around 10:00am that I could barely get out of my chair or hold my head up or my arms. Around 12:30 I emailed folks that I felt awful and was going home—and I had to be careful going down the stairs, I could barely hold my hands up on the steering wheel, and my head was just listing to the side, sometimes resting on my window as I drove home. Leaving the office didn’t immediately make that feel better. I made a doctor’s appointment for the next day because I knew at this point something was not right with me. We ran tests on my thyroid, all good. I wasn’t anemic. Everything else checked out okay. There was no physical explanation for my body behaving this way.
My body was simply throwing the biggest temper tantrum you’ve ever seen. Doing everything in its power to get me to really and truly pay attention to it. And so I finally did.
When I returned to the office after my doctor’s appointment in June of 2018, I spoke with HR and explained that something wasn’t right with me. I explained that we were running tests on my thyroid but we thought it might be mental health/anxiety. I was very fortunate to work for a great company that is very generous to its employees and so I was able to request to take my hours down to 30 hours per week and use up my accumulated sick time each week to keep my full salary. I was also increasing my work-from-home days to two days per week instead of one. This was going to be a trial period for about 12 weeks, I believe, to see if I could either figure out the physical problem or find a way to overcome the anxiety.
During that wonderful trial period of reduced hours, however, I realized that I felt much better….but it was still mostly when I wasn’t at the office. Even only being in the office two days per week, I still had crippling anxiety on those days.
I began to realize that there was no more time for me to “wait” to start fulfilling my life. I was literally ending my life sooner with my inaction.
Now, I don’t necessarily recommend my course of action for everyone, but this is how mine went and I think, for me, it was supposed to happen this way. Toward the end of July 2018, I finally decided that it was time for me to resign and gave my company over two months notice so that we could have plenty of time to close out anything or train up anyone new since I had over 20 years of company knowledge floating in my head. For myself, that next week I was scheduled to take the life coaching certification course and I intended to finally follow my dream of owning my own business.
I get asked a lot if I’m angry or resentful at all toward my former employer. And the truth is, quite simply, that we were not aligned in our goals. They had a different business model in mind than I did. Theirs did not include someone like me doing the role that I thought I wanted and was working so hard for. And my business model for them was not really and truly what I wanted anyway. And all of this is okay. They are free to run their company in any way they wish just like I am free to chase the dreams that I have for my life. It’s a win-win situation.
It also turns out that I was good at my new field. A natural at coaching. And it fulfilled that first goal I had of “helping people.”
The flip side is that being my own boss, setting my own hours, and working out of my home, I could set aside the time for my other goal of “helping the planet,” namely through sustainable/regenerative farming and gardening. So every Friday is “Farm Friday” in which I travel to my family-owned ranch in the Texas Hill Country to care for my quarter-acre garden and the small family orchard of pear and peach trees—and visit with my grandmother. I also have time to care for my pastured chickens during the week and enjoy collecting the rainbow of colored eggs they provide for me and my family.
So again, we’re talking about listening to our bodies…..Immediately after I handed in my notice, my blood pressure dropped. It wasn’t high, at all, even with all this stress – usually 120/80ish. But as soon as I took that first real step toward following my dreams, my blood pressure was consistently more like 107/68. Three months after I left my job I had a follow-up doctor appointment and my blood sugar numbers had dropped almost back to the pre-diabetes range--and I’d even dropped down the dosage of one of my medications during that three months. My doctor was amazed and had never seen such great results before.
In the second half of 2018 I began taking the time to focus on myself and my health and putting that first. I made a game plan to educate myself on the latest research for type 2 diabetes and what methods people were using to get off their medications and reverse their diabetes. I spent more time doing things that brought me joy. I was outside more. I was able to spend time with my family more – and for the first time in years actually had the energy to enjoy that time to its fullest. This year, in 2020, I’m focusing on becoming more Aware and learning to listen even more.
Today I was given an excellent opportunity to practice my Awareness and listen to my body.
This morning a huge panic attack woke me up from a sound sleep. We’re talking massive tightness, or a crushing tightness over my entire chest, from side to side. These things can come out of nowhere sometimes but I think (for me) they are triggered by hormone fluctuations and possibly are my brain’s old neurological pathways kicking in by surprise. Because honestly, I haven’t felt really stressed this week at all and you don’t get much more relaxed than being completely asleep. So why I had the biggest panic attack ever this morning as I’m sleeping is beyond me. And even while eating lunch with friends today I could feel the tightness creep back in.
Even though I’ve been out of the severe-stress environment for over a year, I know that my body is still experiencing this new, learned pattern of anxiety. So while I do not feel stressed I am now taking a moment to listen to my body, be aware of what it’s trying to tell me, and make adjustments accordingly.
Today I had planned to be up at 6:30 at my computer working on some nutrition homework but instead I stayed in bed and breathed a little longer. And then when I did get up I decided to research the symptoms just to make sure it wasn’t more than the panic attack. I’ve also been monitoring my blood pressure and while it was closer to 120/80 again this morning, it is now back down to the 106/78s. And my heart rate has been between 64 and 72 throughout the day.
While I have no logical explanation for why my body is acting out this way, I’m going to spend some time with it and give it the attention it needs today. Other things can wait. Except this blog post…which was mostly written on my phone from the comfort of an Epsom salt hot bath while trying to calm down this morning (Dr. Teal’s Green Tea Matcha for balance and calm is a nice way to start the day). ;)
Main Points: Actually LISTEN to your body when it tries to speak to you and take time for yourself now before it gets too late.
Take care, my friends.
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