Finn’s anxious eyes implore me to find the energy. He tracks my every move while getting ready for the day, him laying sprawled on my husband’s side of the bed. Finn rode the waves of insomnia with me last night. I sent my husband downstairs, hoping our guest bed would gift him a night’s sleep. He was resistant, but one of us had to be functional in the morning. Finn knew something was wrong. He kept sighing, frustrated he didn’t know what was off, lending his warmth and body weight to my restless feet by laying gently on them. He and I are all too familiar with this scenario, me feeling accountable to him, knowing how much he enjoys his morning walks. Him discouraged that I won’t let him settle into a restorative night’s rest.
I slip my ratty sweats on, my golden doodle, Finn, rousing from the bed, responding to my dressing in my walking clothes. He downward dogs, shakes and leaps blithely from the bed. Padding his feet excitedly. We sneak silently out to the front hall. I fasten his collar around his neck, grab my phone and ear phones, throw a beanie, coat and shoes on to protect me from the cold, and we steal out into the morning darkness. Finn is the perfect morning companion, anxious and expecting to get out, preventing me from snoozing my alarm. He embarks on our morning walk with bounding energy, all excitement and drooly smiles.
I have my ear phones tuned to Rewire, a Vital-Side course I stumbled upon while deep diving the free healing and nutrition information on a few accounts I follow on Instagram. Lindsay Mitchell started Vital-Side after struggling with a weak immune system and being diagnosed with Lyme disease. She has medical training that specializes in brain elasticity and has made it her life’s work to help those struggling with chronic illnesses and pain. I was skeptical when I found her content, sure that this was another gimmick promising healing without any result, but desperation kept me curious and I began binging her podcast, “Rewire”. I subscribed to her Instagram account as well, “MyVitalSide” and found that her compassionate approach to healing resonated with me.
The nuts and bolts of her program teaches users to leverage the elasticity in our brains to calm the chronic stress response that is keeping healing at bay. At purchase, I received a booklet with terrifyingly introspective questions prompting me to reexamine my entire thought process. You get the opportunity to learn about our magical brains (always took mine for granted, after the course, I realized how amazing it is!), how they can change, heal, reprogram, and if we work at it, release old patterns and push symptoms to subside.
I poured over the information, the course delivered day by day, having a hard time restraining myself from blazing through the entire curriculum in days, having realized this approach may be the piece I was missing in my healing. Her attitude of being gentle, and kind to our bodies and especially our brains as we heal, having love and compassion for the walking work of art each our bodies truly are, reminded me to slow down and appreciate all the things my body does for me daily. It may still be struggling to sleep, find calm, regulate, etc., but it gives me life through innumerable other processes.
The course focuses heavily on the Limbic System, or your emotional brain, which is where the fight or flight response is initiated. Despite the many efforts made with food, supplements, meditation, and other methodologies, I surmised that my body was still living in a constant state of stress, never accessing the parasympathetic nervous system. This negative feedback loop was engaging my immune system, producing loads of cortisol, and never letting my body rest.
One of the things I appreciated the most from the course was the exercise to envision the whole and healed person I want to be. This type of dreaming was foreign and extremely intimidating because I had not been able to look beyond the present for a long time. I wasn’t looking forward to the future- it brought little sleep, relaxation, and only felt as though it would deliver fear. My happy place when I pictured a whole and healed person was an energetic body, breathing in the ocean air on a beach in Kauai. This model of myself, healed and enjoying life, stood as my beacon. She gave my brain something almost tangible to hold onto as I struggled to pry my body from the grasp of my monster. Lindsay guides you walking around your healed self, making your brain live in that reality, her goal to comfort and communicate safety to a stressed limbic system.
The program forced me to reexamine my old neuropathways – my habits that were no longer serving me. One major overused neuropathway was that I had to reconsider my propensity to blame myself for my health issues. This habit communicated to my brain that I was doing something wrong, something to deserve my health problems. Although I am a firm subscriber that we are called upon to do all we can to better ourselves and our situations rather than being victims, in this case, I was definitely not bringing these issues on myself. My body was sick, needed attention, and no amount of exercise, meditation, or calorie cutting was going to deliver me from my suffering. Once my brain accepted that and I learned to forgive myself for all of the harsh abuse I’d been flinging at it, I slowly emerged from my fight or flight state. I began to find pockets of peace. Not consistently, not all the time, but sometimes. And sometimes led to more times, until I had taught my brain that it was safe and no longer needed to shift into overdrive to protect me.
Our bodies are magical and should be treated with honor and respect, even when, and especially when, they are misbehaving. Many times, the symptoms we are experiencing are our body’s way of telling us that something isn’t right, that we need to reevaluate our environment, our habits, our inner self talk, etc. All of these pieces work in concert to make us a whole being, and thus, can cause symptoms if something isn’t aligning with our needs. Fortunately, if we are responsive, we have the opportunity to change our brains! To change how we feel, how we interact with our world. I am still in the process of changing mine- it’s a daily effort, one that has yielded what was implausible to my previous, suffering self. Now, having undertaken such a project, I don’t envision myself ever surrendering to my monster, the one that tells me suffering is my reality. Rewiring my brain contributed to me wrenching my life out of the jaws of my monster, what could it do for you?