I look at ME/CFS and similar conditions as a stuck healing phase after a stressful time (years or decades). It is time to release stressors that are exhausting you. I think it is a natural process that works best if you step out of the way. Nevertheless, I was stuck for many years myself. Underneath, I write my short healing perspective to destress you completely, your body can do the rest.

While being bed-bound and exhausted with sleep deprivation, it is hard to know what steps to take practically. I therefore recommend the following steps:

First start with presence. Ignore your smart-phone and be here and now. Maybe bored in a room, staring at the ceiling with severe symptoms. After a few hours or days, you will notice a shift. You can become really tired, but in a good way. Connect more with the body, but ignore the symptoms in your head, shoulders, limbs and spine. Accept them and don’t fight them. Accept your current situation. The egoic problem solver has lost, that part of your being needs to surrender. Focus on the front of your body between your neck and the bladder.

This will help you with your sleep and enable you to have a better sleep-rhythm. Although that often needs some effort and commitment. Connect more with the stress in your body that is between the vocal cords and the lower gut, emotional stress attaches itself to organs. Breathe deeply and consciously while you connect with your body.

Pace yourself and build up your activities slowly. With every new thing or extra thing you are doing, you can trigger stressful emotions. Journal about them. Maybe pressure, fear, self-pressure, etc. Learn actively about yourself and explore unconscious realms by being brutally honest. What is the reason you desire things? Whatever you want to reach, deal with the opposite that is inside you now.

Express yourself not only with journaling, but also with movement, via for example ecstatic dance. Become aware of stressful coping mechanisms and try to stop it. Feel the stress in your body at these moments and breathe through it.

Learn about your beliefs and reprogram your mind with new habits and new beliefs with self-hypnosis. We all have thousands if not millions of beliefs of beliefs, some of these beliefs are negative and stressful to have, plus you need to keep thinking them in order to believe in them. Reprogram negative (unconscious) beliefs or empty your mind completely.

Learn to release old emotions via all kinds of release methods. Connect with hurt inner-child aspects and love yourself a little more everyday. Give up your resistance towards yourself and life. The more you understand your needs and boundaries, the more you will love yourself.

Implement new habits and boundaries. Learn to say “No!”, especially to your own egoic mind. You are so much more powerful than you know. Don’t give yourself away. Take your space and place.

Give up the desperate fight between hope and despair. Let it go and accept that you have lost this mind game. Silence the mind and enter the realm of knowing. Know that you will heal when you step out of the way. Work every day on all these aspects and don’t be afraid for symptoms as it can be a good sign. Learn more about TMS and the limbic brain and how symptoms are there to protect you from your own psyche. Whenever there is fear, where is it in your body? Connect with it. Don’t think about it.

Symptoms are not scary, but a signal that you almost release a stressor, or that your stress levels are too high due to (unconscious) resistance. Take back your life. Implement joy in every step in recovery. Let that energy become bigger in your daily life. People who are unhappy in a small house, won’t be happy in a bigger house. This is where you have to retrain yourself to have joy. If you can enjoy rock-bottom, then you have learnt something massive that nobody can ever take away from you.

Joy will give you energy, maybe energy to heal your body and become really sleepy or energy to do something small that matters. That good state will trigger stressors as it no longer fits with your new state of being. Then you need to do “the work” again. Use neuroplasticity after the inner work and you can have joy again. Make fun of yourself and laugh about all the seriousness, this will help you become calmer and maybe you can learn to act and talk slower as well.

You will surf the wave of recovery. Good luck.

Watch the video below for a more detailed description.