122: Recovering from Long Covid & Chronic Fatigue Syndrome with Diana

Diana H

Chazmith: [00:00:00] Welcome to Our Power Is Within Podcast. I'm your host Chazmith, and my hope for this podcast is to inspire you to take your power back and realize that you are the healer you have been looking for all along, we are capable of healing and mind in body and soul. Today's episode is brought to you by Jeannie Kulwin Coaching. 

Jeannie is a stress and mind body coach based in LA, and she was actually a guest on our show in July of last year, episode 95, and just two weeks ago for episode one 20, we had a deep conversation on how to view fear as a guidepost and how other common emotions often labeled as bad, can be positive feedback.

These episodes are both so insightful, so I really encourage you to give them a listen if you miss them. Jeannie spent 16 years herself struggling from chronic pain, chronic fatigue, and a myriad of other symptoms that left her physically and mentally exhausted. However, she healed all her symptoms and she's now obsessed with getting her clients fast results through her one-on-one mind, body and stress coaching program.

This is a three month program that gives client support, consistency, and accountability to decrease stress, release stuck negative emotions, and finally heal their pain. Jeannie offers free 45 minute consultations where you'll together identify what is holding you back so that you can take your next steps for healing.

Go to her website: jeanniekulwin.com and book your free call. Today we have another absolutely amazing testimonial story. I don't know about you, but I love doing these interviews and getting this opportunity to listen to people's stories. Do you remember a few weeks back, episode one 19 where I had Kardin and Jen on the podcast?

We got to listen to both Kardin and Jen's personal stories, which actually ties into how they were brought together and how they and did creating c CFS school. And it was a really great episode. So if you have not listened to that, make sure that you tune into that as well. Now for today, I actually have.

A guest, Diana, who is actually here to share her story of how CFS school and the tools that she has learned through CFS school has changed her life. Diana, as you will hear, is still recovering and continues on her healing journey. However, how far she has come in just six short months is nothing short of amazing.

Diana was sent into overdrive from her Covid experience, which led to chronic fatigue syndrome, which led to a complete overhaul of her life as she knew it. But in this episode, Diana shares all that she has learned through this experience already and the ways her life has shifted in a positive way, though she would never want to do it over again.

She is at a place where she can now see how. It has all been for her, not to her. She is incredibly well-spoken and inspiring, so please enjoy. Diana, thank you so much for being here with me today and having a willingness to share your 

Diana: story. Hi, Chazmith. Thank you for inviting me. 

Chazmith: Yeah, of course. I'm so excited.

Just to set it up, I know that what we're gonna be doing today is sharing your personal healing and recovery story. I'd like to start by actually just simply having you share with us what you have been focused on healing and recovering from

Diana: Yes. I have been focusing my healing on recovering from what I call o lung covid and chronic fatigue syndrome.

Kind of one and the same. Can we talk about that? 

Chazmith: Yeah, of course. 

Diana: Okay. I got Covid in January of 2021 and that was where my unwellness began. And so that is what I've been focusing on healing. And I noticed that it had a lot of overlap with the chronic fatigue syndrome community. And that's how I found about recovery and how I found out about nervous system mind, body healing and all that.

So that was my intro to [00:05:00] it and yeah that's how I see my, what I'm recovering. . 

Chazmith: Okay. And I know that what you've been doing primarily to recover is following the Chronic fatigue school program, the CFS school, correct? Yes. Yeah. Okay. And from my understanding, you started CFS school about six months ago, and it's a 12 week program that you followed and completed about three months ago, but you continue to use the tools from CFS School?

Diana: Yes. All correct. 

Chazmith: Based on just like the last six months of your healing journey and where you're at today, could you share with us some of the things that you can do today that you couldn't do prior to beginning the healing journey when you were in the brinks of the heaviness of symptoms during your unwell period. 

Diana: Yes. That is an amazing place to start the interview because I think that this is what the people wanna hear and that's what I wanted to hear. Like I said, my intro, the way I found out about mind body healing and nervous system healing was via listening to recovery stories from Raelen Agle and Liz Carlson's YouTubes.

I found those and that's how I've started to believe in healing for myself. So to answer your question I can describe where I was at this past summer, July, 2022, right before I started CFS School. . I was very unwell. I had recently dropped out of graduate school, which was very sad for me.

I had gotten let go from my job, so I wasn't working. I wasn't able to work. I had been holding on to my job and really suffering for it. So I was recently unemployed, dropped out of grad school, and I was not exercising at all. We might talk about this later, but I've been a pretty big athlete. So zero exercise, not working feeling awful and needing to take a nap and having heavy fatigue every day. So that's what I was doing before CFS school, doing not very much. And so over the past six months, my capacity to live life has grown immensely.

And that's the whole beauty of it. That's why I am so happy to have found this work. So at this moment, it is January, 2023 and I am working part-time again, which, Boy, I wish we could all just work part-time.  I'm like at one point it was like, my goal is to work full-time again. I gotta get back to it.

And I'm like, why does anyone work eight hours a day during the most beautiful, wonderful hours of the day in a great cubicle. Anyway I'm working part-time, which I think is great, and I am exercising again. I exercise most days. I typically call it more of movement. I'm not so into the heavy exercise anymore, but I go for walks and hikes can do that every day.

I can do yoga as much as I want. I am skiing again, which is probably my main passion and source of joy. So I go skiing a couple times a week again, which, For reference last winter season, I skied zero times. I tried to go ski twice and just had a massive massive symptom flare, massive issue, couldn't do it.

And so yeah, I'm skiing again and I can travel, I can socialize. Those are things I couldn't do before, and generally living life again. 

Chazmith: That's So awesome. How awesome does it feel to just be able to do skiing, which is like such a huge passion of yours?

Diana: It feels so good. It is. Yeah. It's beyond words to not be able to do something that you love and then be able to do it again.

It's what I hope for everyone who's going through this to have that moment where you get to do your thing again. 

Chazmith: How did You, I don't wanna say cope because we know that we don't wanna just cope with things, we wanna heal and thrive through things, but how was it for you when you first discovered, because when you have a [00:10:00] passion like that's that big and you're a really big athlete and into being active, and all of a sudden you find that your life is getting smaller and you can't do those things.

How was that for you to manage? Like how did you navigate your emotions and the heaviness of not being able to do something like skiing for an entire winter when it's something that brings you so much joy? 

Diana: Oh man. To be honest, I held on for way too long. When I was becoming unwell after my covid infection, I just couldn't let go of exercise in skiing, I'm also a big runner.

You know how obsessive runners can be? They must run. You can't Yeah. Can't take days off. Runners high. Runners high. The endorphins are addictive. And so I held on for quite a while until my body really said no. And then I was pretty, then I was at that point, I was good in the sense that I drew a line in the sand and I said, I'm not gonna do this to myself anymore.

And I took a break. But as for coping with not being able to do what you love, whew, I didn't have good coping mechanisms. It took me a long time to find other things that I loved besides outdoor sports. And it took growing my nervous system capacity to a certain level to be able to slow down enough to enjoy and find joy in, in normal life, things that are less exciting and active. I don't have tips for coping. I wasn't great at it. It was really hard. 

Chazmith: Do you feel that you were able to eventually create new and alternative joys and find other ways to just manifest joy in your life before you were able to exercise and ski again once you were in the CFS school program?Or were you able to actually even navigate and do that prior? 

Diana: I would Say maybe a little bit prior when I had started to introduce myself to mind body healing and learn about nervous system healing. I did that for maybe a month or two before actually starting CFS school. But it truly was. Growing my nervous system capacity and my ability to slow down and be with things, be with myself, be with life, be with the moment that opened up my capacity for joy in, in simple things like the sun on my skin, the shapes of the clouds in the sky, drinking a delicious beverage or even just relaxing the joy of non-doing, of the joy of having free time for myself.

And we can talk about that at some point. I'm very passionate about embodiment and somatics and that has been, Boy, probably the biggest change and transformation for me the tool that I found the most mind blowing and life changing in how I saw myself and see the world and experience the world is developing embodiment and somatic awareness.

Chazmith: interesting. Prior being an athlete and being very active prior to all of this, you would say that it wasn't until you really immersed yourself in this healing journey through CF F School that you actually developed somatic awareness

Diana: Yes, and it's bizarre. I had a little, I was confused about that.

I remember asking Kardin about that because he's the somatics guy, and I didn't understand I think I've always had very good proprioception, which is you're, feeling your body in relation to space. So I have great balance. I can ski, I can, I did gymnastics when I was a kid. But as for the, in interoception, the ability to sense what is going on inside your body such as am I hungry?

Am I nervous? Am I those internal sensations. I had not had that very developed for a multitude of reasons. And interestingly, I think athletics plays into that. Yeah. Because especially in the endurance sports world, which is what I was into the running and long distance uphill skiing is there's very much a culture of mind over matter, where your body tells you it's tired and you surmount that with your mental fortitude. It's very glorified in sports and in our society. And I think that I was [00:15:00] very much subject to that. I had trained my body to, I had trained myself. I was very well versed at ignoring my body signals in order to achieve what I wanted to achieve. , bet that's, I bet some people can resonate with.

Chazmith: 1000% I can. I was also, prior to my perfect storm, an athlete, I was very heavily involved in CrossFit. IT's interesting that you bring that up. I remember one of the quotes and one of the sayings and expressions that I heard all the time in CrossFit was, oh, our body has so much more capacity than our mind.

Our mind will always get quit. Wanna quit before our body's ready. And I can look back now and find that statement so incredibly and utterly false. When the body says it's tired, it's actually the mind that's no, I got this. I'm gonna keep going. I remember people all the time saying, oh, you're so aware of your body.

But again, proprioception and yeah, I could hold a certain posture. Embrace when doing heavy lifting or something like that. But I realized in hindsight that was not bought true body awareness in any capacity. I had no relationship with the true sensations that were right below the surface and the emotions that were beneath those sensations.

So yeah it's very interesting how often in that, in the athletic world, we actually, we think we have this body awareness, but it's actually so vastly different from a true a true somatic awareness. 

Diana: Yes and yes. 

Chazmith: So I wonder now, because if I asked you prior to Covid, It sounds to me like you were living what you would've thought of at the time as a very ideal life.

You had no illness, you were you were, you had a job. I'm not sure how much you loved it, but you expressed, you were very sad about leaving grad school, so you were obviously grateful to be in grad school. You had hobbies, you were an athlete, you ran every day. But looking back now, knowing what you know now and the different relationship that you've now developed with your body, do you feel that in some capacity everything you've been through was for you?

Diana: Yes. And I love that you brought that up, and it's something that I had heard people say in their recovery stories when I was unwell. And I was like, are they just say are they for real or are they just, drunk off this positivity BS I was like, is this real? And I would say for myself at this point, I don't care to think about would I have wanted this to happen or not.

I don't think that's a relevant question for myself. But the truth is that this experience has happened for me as opposed to the perspective of that I had previously, which is this is all happening to me and it's horrible because it's, it took away my life. Yeah. As it was. Now from this side, I can see that it was for me because I can see that although my life was abundant and I was truly authentically having a lot of fun and living my life and enjoying it, I didn't know what I didn't know and I didn't know about the nervous system.

I put so much value on doing my whole life was about doing, and I didn't even have the perception of being and my experience, how did I feel while I was running, or how did I enjoy these activities that I was doing and I didn't. Have that. I was, in hindsight, looking back, I was very much in a stress state almost all the time, which was really taking away from my ability to enjoy the present moment.

My life felt a lot like a to-do list. And that's not to say that I was not, I was absolutely having fun while I was having fun, but I had a level of dissociation and I was living in my head. And now I think back to that and I think, that's just not a way to live. That's not the way that I want to live, [00:20:00] is in my head and solely for achievements.

And so I do think that this experience has course corrected me and my life back to myself. and to my true self. And it's shown me what I was missing at that time because my life was so full and it was so fun, but it was missing this essential element of true embodied presence and enjoying what I was doing because I was so frantic to just get everything done.

Chazmith: That's a really good observation. So a few questions about this now. Knowing what you know now and how you approach life today, how is your approach to skiing different today than it was two winters ago? 

Diana: That's a fun, that's a fun thing to think about. At that time, two winters ago, before I became unwell.

A good descriptor or a good detail to know is I was obsessed with my Garmin watch as many endurance athletes are. And like I said, I was going out and having fun and doing these big adventures. So the type of skiing I do a lot of back country skiing, which is where you hike up the mountain on your skis and then you ski down.

So you get to ski in nature not at the ski resort. And I would be out there and I would be certainly enjoying the views and the experience and the solitude and the nature and the company of my friends. But I also had a lot of my attention on my own performance, hence, being obsessed with the garment watch and how many vertical feet did I climb and how many quantifying everything I did, and then judging myself for it and trying to prove myself.

And I think that really took away from the purity of the experience, the purity of the movement, and the joy and the presence in nature. And nowadays when I go out I don't ski as far, and I feel it more, it feels like time goes slower. I don't even use a watch anymore. I don't track how far I go or how I don't track anything.

I just exercise or move as much as I feel like, as much as my body wants to do that day. And then I go back and the experience of doing it without all the burden of the pressure I put on myself and the quantify, the quantification of something so beautiful and embodied. Without that it's just what it is.

It's pure joy. 

Chazmith: Because you mentioned how over time you developed these new joys, these more simplistic joys, like the sun, how the sun felt on you or the shape of clouds when you go skiing these days, does that all play a role? Does that come into your presence? Do you, are you more connected to all those little beautiful joys that are all around us all the time that maybe you weren't as aware of before? 

Diana: Oh, yes. In nature there's, there are infinite beautiful things to notice. and especially now that I go slower, I have more time to see them. So the sparkling of the snow, the bark of a tree the feeling of the ski gliding across the snow, a lot of those sensations are embodied.

It's the feeling of movement, the feeling of my body moving through space. All those simple joys come into play.  Yeah. 

Chazmith: I love that so much. As you were describing it, I was like, oh, I was just . I was having my own little visualization moment. 

Diana: It's a good, it's a good visual. 

Chazmith: Yes, it is. So I wonder, when you were first getting back into movement and all that, how were you able to discern what was truly your body being tired and ready to stop verse what was your brain doing fatigue because you had said, now you ski more slow.

You don't go out as far and you just listen to your body and when you're tired you stop. But how were you able initially to really get clear on the difference between true tiredness of the body versus doing fatigue? 

Diana: Yeah. First I just wanted to mention what you said about doing. I think people might be interested in that.

Cuz when I first heard it, I thought it was super weird and I had no idea what people were talking about. . what we're referring to is that in CFS school, instead of saying I have fatigue, we use neurolinguistic programming principles, n l p to, to change the language, to say something more along the lines of, , I am doing fatigue.

And that [00:25:00] takes one out of the illness identity. Like I have anxiety or I'm doing anxiety. And that comes from Phil Parker of the Lightning process, created the concept of the word doing to change the way we think about our symptom experiences. And it's really important. I love that in this moment my body is doing fatigue, but I am not fatigue.

So that was really important to me. That was, that's one of the first steps that we learned in some of the first modules of CFS school, that, that really did change the way I saw myself and my symptoms and my experience. So just wanted to put that in there real quick. If anyone Yeah. Everyone wants to look up Phil Parker and the doing.

And neurolinguistic programming. It's pretty cool. 

Chazmith: I love that. Thank you for sharing. And I wanted to tell everyone who's listening that we can interchange that with anything. I am doing pain, I am doing burning sensation. I am doing pins and needles or I'm doing numbness.

Like whatever it is that is your mind body syndrome. That's what we can do. And it reminds me of how they always say you're not angry, you're feeling angry, but you aren't anger. , you're just feeling anger.

Yeah. Thank you for explaining that. 

Diana: Yeah. It's good stuff. It puts that little space between us and the experience.

And even in CFS school, we actually say, there's a part of me doing fatigue, which is one more step. Remove that says not every single aspect. If you can notice that you're doing fatigue, if you can notice that you're experiencing fatigue, , there's actually a part of you that is not doing fatigue. The part that is noticing the part that is doing fatigue. Yes. So that's a whole other separate long thing to talk about is parts. I think people might, many people might be familiar with parts in general, but what I just said there is a good segue to your question. So I said just now that there's a part of me that is aware that there is another part of me that is doing the fatigue.

And the part of me that is noticing that the other part of me is doing something, a symptom, whatever, that in CFS school we call the true self, it's pure awareness and consciousness. And in CFS school, we learn how to connect to true self. We learn about our we practice. and explore our own individual true self and experience of true self.

And then we practice resourcing our true self. And resourcing is when you call upon it in the moment. So I say it in my head sometimes. I'm resourcing true self in this moment to, because I need that perspective for what's going on. And so that is how I approached returning to movement and exercise, which began with walks.

And before I would head out, I would call upon my true self and embody my true self to begin this walk. And so as I was out on my short walk, five, 10 minutes, I would call upon true self and put on that true self perspective, which again, is that. Witness consciousness perspective so that I am then able to just observe my body in the moment.

A good way to visualize it sometimes is it's like another, a little spirit floating over you who's watching you objectively. It's the witness, they're witnessing you. And so I even do it to this day when I exercise, is that my true self consciousness now that I've practiced it so much is very much in line online and embedded into me.

So I'm able to shift from my current consciousness of being in the moment where you're overwhelmed by anything that happens in your body to that witness perspective that says calmly or rather curiously and compassionately says I'm noticing that. My, my cals feel tired, or I'm noticing that my heart rate is going up, or I'm feeling frazzled, I'm feeling overwhelmed.

And in that case, in CFS school, we would then do space, which is our brain train retraining technique on that. But I would notice, I would be on my walk and I would notice an element of dis-ease from the true self perspective. And then I would stop and I would really recruit that true self and say, okay, true self is this.

Am I feeling tired or am I [00:30:00] feeling fatigue? What's the difference? Or what are you feeling? And really, I actually, I didn't even discern between those two. At that moment, it was more like, , am I ready to head back? Also, sometimes I check in with my body as an entity as well, and I would say, would you like to go further or not?

The big difference there is that I would always do what it said and if I wasn't sure I would go back not push myself. And so that's an I, that's an important principle of CFS school is that although we do not do traditional pacing, we also never push, which is really tricky for people to understand.

How could it's a subtle balance, but that in between hitting that subtle balance is the sweet spot. 

Chazmith: Insights would you share with anybody who is listening to you right now and they're like, I really have a hard time connecting what is true self is like? , 

Diana: Every single aspect of the mind, body and nervous system work, it takes practice.

And there is no getting around that. It's neuroplasticity. And we have practiced our unhelpful neurological pathways, tens of hundreds of thousands of times. And so we need to practice new states and helpful pathways that we wanna cultivate. CFS school has some amazing audios to connect you to your true self to visualize and practice and explore and learn about your true self.

But it's completely normal if you hear about that witness consciousness and you're I don't have that. But the truth is that you do. Everybody does. It's just some people. Resource it more or use it more or less. Yeah. But it's there in every human being. . 

Chazmith: So when you first started, was it something that you didn't have as strong of a connection to or couldn't really hear or just discern the difference and it just took you showing up over and over again to get there?

Yes. 

Diana: I think I had it, but I had gotten a really strong pathway of ignoring it really deeply developed. Cuz I think we all have I really do think we all have that, that witness perspective. But like I said, I had gotten so used to overriding that with Mind Over Matter that I had deconditioned that pathway.

So yeah, I had to redevelop it. One thing I'll say some of the beauty of this work is that I just mentioned practice is essential. You have to practice. It's something that Jen says a lot in her coaching and it can be a hard truth. You feel like, oh, I don't want to, or it's so much work and it's just oh, when you're in that place of I can't do it.

And so it can be a harsh thing to hear and I know a lot of people don't wanna hear that and I didn't wanna hear it. But one thing I'll say that I'm noticing at this stage for me, having used CFS school mind body tools for six months, is that as we know about neuroplasticity, we can talk about ski slopes again.

You cut in, you have this neurological pathway cut in and it's really deep. And so whenever you put your sled at the top of the hill, it's gonna go in the deepest track and it goes in the groove and it just takes you all the way to the bottom and you're like, oops, I did it again. But as you forge a new pathway, first you have to stomp down it, and it takes forever and it's really hard.

And then another person tracks it in or say, every day you hike up the hill and track in a new path. Every day. And the old one gets snowed over and then you have the new path. So after practicing these things over time I am delighted and feel so fortunate to be in a place now where I don't have to redirect, and do so much work all the time because I've established a new neural pathway and like I said, true self for me, it just exists now in my consciousness and I don't have to try so hard to recruit it. 

Chazmith: At what point in the past six months of your retraining and healing, did you get to a place where you felt ready to try skiing again?

And what were some of the indicators that helped you to feel ready? 

Diana: I just did it on a whim. I had been walking and hiking all summer and that was really nice because it's so controlled. You can stop anytime, turn around. Very low commitment. I also live, I have [00:35:00] a trail out my back door. I'm very fortunate to live on some hills.

And, once it snowed here in November, I just went and that's actually how a lot of my my milestones occurred. I noticed that for me personally, in my own my own patterning, that pressure was a really big doing for me. As we talked about, the concept of doing pressure was one of the biggest things that caused me dis-ease.

And I'm a big planner. So I've also, I also would say that I historically do anxiety. And so the more I would plan something and say, am I ready? Again, doing perfectionism. And those all combine into one big bundle of doing, of unhelpful neurology as we call it. And that, that was my classic coping pattern is planning everything and perfectionism and am I ready and is it gonna be perfect?

And trying to control all the variables and putting a ton of pressure on myself. So I came to learn that I did a lot better when things happened more spontaneously. Someone would ask me, like my boyfriend would ask me, Hey, do you wanna go on this trip with me? And I was like, ah, panic, overwhelm, anxiety. I don't know.

Too much pressure if we, if I just went. And that's how I had those milestones, like going on my first trip camping trip and traveling and skiing to do it more spontaneously instead of planning. well in advance, and then having weeks of doing anxiety of all the pressure I had put on myself. I have to ski on this day at this time when I'm ready.

I think it's a lot of the freedom that this new way of being in my body and in my mind it allows a new sense of freedom that, that I can do things even when I'm not a hundred percent ready and I'm not a hundred percent certain that it'll go 100% perfectly. And that is the freedom that develops as you grow your capacity, your nervous system capacity, the capacity to be with whatever comes and know that it will be okay, which was definitely not the experience I had.

Prior to CFS school, I had the opposite. Everything. I was so worried that anything would, everything would go wrong. I was catastrophizing all the time. And that's what this work can give you. That, and that, that was a big milestone for me recently is this embodied sense of okay-ness that, that things are gonna be okay.

I can go do something and it might go well, it might not go well, but either way I'm gonna be okay. And again, that is not what I had during my illness experience prior to CFS school. 

Chazmith: Yeah, that all makes so much sense. It's as if, how do I wanna say, if you. there, it just feels like a lot less pressure.

It was okay, I'm gonna go skiing today, and hey, I might only last 10 minutes, or I might last all day. And either way, no matter how it works out, I'm okay. 

Diana: Yes, exactly. 

Chazmith: Rather than planning it a week in advance and then thinking about it for the entire week and feeling all this pressure. , oh, what if I, what if I don't wake up feeling well that day?

And I, and what if this doesn't, what if this doesn't work? The anxiety, the pressure, the fears, you're not giving yourself a chance to do those things. Rather just be a little bit more spontaneous and trust that you're not putting a pressure on yourself to have any outcome from the commitment to doing like the, say the skiing, for example.

Just like your hiking. You didn't put a pressure on yourself to have to get to a certain place before you turned around. It was more like, I'm just gonna step outside and I'm gonna start hiking and I'm gonna turn around wherever I turn around. And that's okay.

Diana: Yes. And that is something that was really hard for me about CFS school originally, is being a very perfectionist planner, controlling, even before I became unwell, I was definitely, I had a lot of mental rigidity and Karden and Jen are such beautiful, amazing people in a sense that they are so fluid and non perfectionistic. Although anyone who's listened to Jen's interviews will know that she had, she ex was doing high level perfectionism, but very much retrained it. And you can tell because [00:40:00] the way their program is, it is the opposite of perfectionism.

Everything is so fluid and it goes on the principle of listening to your body and your true self. And that was hard for me because I wanted to know, I was very rigid. I wanted to know what to do and when I have, I'm very confident in my discipline and perseverance and ability. And when I started the program I knew that I thought I believe that I can heal because I am a disciplined person and I will do whatever it takes, but that that is not going to get you there.

It's a delicate dance and it requires, this type of work requires more flexibility and fluidity and perfectionism is one of the main drivers of this kind of disease for myself. And so it was funny to be doing the program and to get confused and frustrated sometimes. I just want everything to be written out so rigidly and I'll follow all these steps.

But I had to learn that's more of maybe what traditional pacing would be for exercise. , you walk one minute, one day, then two minutes the next day, then 3, 4, 5. But I had to cultivate a whole different consciousness that I learned from them. And now that I realize is such a skill for life to be fluid and flexible and you can't control and plan everything.

And the more you do, the more that will create disease in your mind, body, whether you're experiencing chronic illness or not. That kind of behavior is rampant in our society and it's not helping us. 

Chazmith: We can't approach our healing through the same personality traits that may have contributed to us getting sick, aka perfectionism.

If you wanna do it perfect, but maybe trying to do life Perfect added to the unwellness. How do we try to do perfect to get well? As you were beginning to go out and say yes to more things like your, you're skiing, your first camping trip, stuff like that.

You're on your way to the mountains or maybe you're already there, you already got your ski boots on, but you feel this rise in your body doing fear or anxiety. What tools at that moment did you leverage to really help you come back into safety and move into the experience anyhow.

Diana: Yeah, so that's when I use the tools and the way I did it and the way we do it in CFS school is you use the tools before, during, and after. And they become integrated into your life. So there's a practice called Future Selfing in CFS school where you essentially visualize yourself. So before I would go out on my first outings, and I still use it somewhat to this day, but you visualize this is very simplified.

You visualize the activity going well and how you want to feel while you're doing it. And then your brain doesn't know the difference between actually doing the activity or if you're doing a fully embodied visualization. And so when you do the activity, the idea of being that you're, you would feel the way that you visualized feeling before.

So I would do future suing before the outing often, and then during the outing if that pulse of fear or anxiety came up. That is a time I would use a lot more of the somatic tools. So one thing I really love about somatics and tools that I use that come from somatic experiencing is that they can be more secret in public, or even if you're at your house and you don't want the people you live with to be looking at you like you're all weird whispering to yourself and doing visualizations and hand movements, the somatics are amazing for that.

So I could be out there and either sitting in my car ready to go out or even clicked into my skis and using those somatic tools to. Essentially presence myself because fear and anxiety is projecting the worst about the future. And what's beautiful about working with the body is it brings you into the present.

[00:45:00] And in the present those fears don't exist. A really great nervous system modifier that is somatic is smiling. So sometimes I'm out skiing and I just smile, and that tells my mind from the bottom up that we must be safe if we're smiling. I also use breathing, tapping on my chest. People might be familiar with those.

And really the most subtle somatics I was talking about that are very secretive, that I use a lot are things like grounding. So feeling my feet on the ground. I did that a lot while walking, just feeling the sensation of the ground. That's awesome. And that's, ooh, and one more, one more . Yeah.

yeah. Is the main thing I would do actually while being out and about whether exercising or just out in the world where there's lots of people and chaos, which was really disregulating for me, is presenting in my, presenting myself in the moment via what they call orienting, which is just literally becoming aware of your surroundings through all the five senses.

Because something amazing about the body is that if you don't feel your, if you don't notice your surroundings it is trying to protect you and your body will go into a more. of a threat mode, it, it will protect you against any possible threats. But if you orient yourself to your true environment, like right now, I'm just in my home and I'm completely safe.

And if I use all my five senses to see and feel all the things around me. , my nervous system will perceive it correctly and it will know that I am currently safe in my home. 

Chazmith: I love that. I love orienting. It's one of my favorite things to do especially when I'm out on walks and I start noticing that I wanna turn my walk into a to-do list, like thinking about all the things I need to get done today. Yeah. I'm like no. This walk, I'm outside. I'm in nature. I'm gonna be here now. the to-do list can come later okay. 

Chazmith: So few more questions here. Throughout this whole experience, do you feel like there's anything you haven't discussed yet that might have been like your biggest struggles through this journey, this healing journey? And then if so, what were some of the ways that you overcame them? 

Diana: Yes, I had really wanted to talk about this.

I was thinking of what my biggest hurdles were. and it all came down to one thing, which is being in a free state, and I think this probably applies to a lot of people. That for me, fatigue, which was my main symptom experience fatigue, was freeze in the world of polyvagal theory. Nervous system states fight, flight, freeze or Fawn. For me, I was in a constant state of freeze. My body was shut down because it got overwhelmed and I would oscillate between fight or flight sometimes but always crash back down into freeze. And so that for me is the ultimate hurdle for, I expect so many other people as well. to when you're in freeze, your body is telling you in every way to do nothing, yet you have to do something to begin to heal.

And every day, for me, for a long time, felt well and still to varying degrees. When I do fall back into freeze, it feels so hard. It's just the worst because freeze is so all consuming and as we know about the body it completely colors your mind and your perception of what you can do. And so I feel for everyone so much experiencing that you wanna get better, you wanna do the things, but you just can't because you're just so frozen.

And How to overcome that. What I learned how to do it gradually, which is where I think that nervous system healing is. The golden ticket to me for this kind of experience is that learning polyvagal theory and how to thaw out of a freeze which is part of CFS school and is essentia. I mean for me, almost every hurdle was just freeze.

Whether it's resistance, self-doubt, [00:50:00] procrastination, those are all symptoms of freeze for me. And so learning the polyvagal theory and saying, hey, I'm not a bad person. I'm not lazy, I'm not a loser. My body is currently in a free state and it's trying to protect me, but it's not what I need right now, and I have these magic tools and I know how to thaw out that freeze, whether it's via brain retraining somatically.

In CFS school, we do a somatic type of brain retraining, so all in one, it's great, but repeatedly learning what freeze is and learning how to get out of it is so important and was really important for me to be able to do all of the required work to heal myself and get. 

Chazmith: I love this so much. I've never heard thawing out your freeze.

Diana: I love that statement. That's so fun. Oh, you have to thaw it out because it has to be a slow thaw if you try to break out a freeze, like hitting an ice sculpture with a mallet . If that's your freeze, if you try to just bust out of it, it's really overwhelming to your nervous system. So you also need to be gentle.

But this is why we learn all this nervous system, polyvagal, somatic material so that we know what's going on and we know how to get out of it. 

Chazmith: Makes so much sense. And I think about how I spent so long in the mind, body world, not even knowing what freeze was.

Diana: Yes. I think it's really important for anyone experiencing Chronic fatigue syndrome or related chronic conditions to know about freeze. Because when you don't know what's going on, like I said, you feel like you just suck. That's how I felt, like why am I so unmotivated? Why am I so sluggish? I just, something's wrong with me. And it's not it's your nervous system doing what it knows how to do.

But if you know that, then you can put in new inputs to tell it to do something else. And it's huge. 

Chazmith: Yeah. And you already no longer do fatigue In only six months. 

Diana:I no longer do fatigue. 

Chazmith: That's amazing. That's so amazing. 

Diana: It is. And if you had told me that six months ago when I, the day I started CFS school, I was so nervous.

I had put so much pressure on myself. to do it right and to get results. And God, if someone had told me in six months you would no longer be doing fatigue, I would have had the biggest full body sigh of relief of all time. And so that's what I wanna tell people is that it'll probably take you a different amount of time.

It might take you less than me or more than me, or you're different, but healing is possible.  

Chazmith: what's next for you? Because  prior to all of this were in grad school, you expressed that you were very sad to have to drop out. You are working part-time, but you're realizing that everyone should work part-time and full-time jobs are absolutely ludicrous. I, yes. Concur. What’s next in your world? 

Diana: The truth is, I don't know, and that creates some feeling of discomfort. The nervous system really does not enjoy uncertainty. But I'm learning to become more okay with uncertainty and practicing that and trusting that the right thing will come in time.

And I'm thinking about it, what it is. That's another practice we have in CFS school is how it's, it goes along with the living and alignment or emerging in true self, authentic self alignment. they teach you, they teach us actually how to do a form of manifestation that is in alignment with all your parts.

So it's not traditional manifestation that says, I am successful.  I am abundant. It's more nuanced than that, and it's, it has to be true to you.  So I'm practicing that and it's really great. It teaches you how to really feel what is in alignment with your body and yourself and not just what you think looks good, which for me was going to graduate school and getting this good job and being successful at athletics, et cetera, et cetera.

That is what I thought was the life I wanted, and now it's not I don't know. We'll see. 

Chazmith: Yeah, that's awesome. I think if [00:55:00] anything, this is also just an opportunity for you to grow because you're just learning how to teach your nervous system to feel safe, even in the uncertainty and not shift into control mode where you need to figure it all out and plan and make something happen, which is really awesome.

Final question I ask everybody, if you could share one message with the world for the rest of your life, one message across the board to everybody you've ever known and everybody you don't know, what message would you wanna share with them? 

Diana: I would share what is true for me, and maybe it'll be true for some people.

My biggest guiding light, and the biggest takeaway I have from this whole experience is reconnecting to my body. So like I said, I used to live a lot in my head. And again, I think society really encourages us to do but I have found so much more life and joy and a greater experience of life now that I have developed somatic awareness and begun to live through my body and trust my body has become my, like I said, my guiding light.

So I guess I would say that to other people, but really, I'm just saying this for me and maybe it resonates for you too, that honoring the body, trusting the body, and using the body as my guide for what is right for me in every way. has been the biggest life changer, and also for me, has contributed immensely to my healing.

Once I started listening to my body, everything flipped. Because my dis-ease my illness was my body saying no. And so once I learned to listen to my body and started allowing what it wanted and me saying yes to it, everything changed for me. 

Chazmith: Indeed. Yes. Thank you for sharing that. How can people connect with you or just follow along with your continued  story?

Diana:I have an Instagram that I used specifically for CFS school in connecting with other self healers on in the program. It is at. @Loving.recovering 

 I am completely open to anyone messaging me. Don't be shy. 

Chazmith: This was so fantastic. I had so much fun chatting with you and just learning about your story and all the different dynamics.

It's been really inspiring even for me. So I have absolutely no doubt that there will be so many benefits for other people who are gonna be tuned into this. So I just wanted to say again, thank you for being here and being vulnerable and having a willingness to show up and share your experience of healing and chronic fatigue school.

Diana: Thank you, Chaz. You're a star. . 

Chazmith: All right, friends, that is what we have for today. Please remember to tune in Friday for our mini Challenge episode and see what we have in store for the week ahead. Remember, these little daily habits are for everyone, and always more fun with a friend sore your spouse, a friend or a family to join in.

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Until next time, make this week so great.