What is the Cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome?
Before you start to solve the riddle of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome it is crucial to know what is the cause of CFS. There are many possible explanations and I´m sure you´ve heard about a lot of them, so I am not going to go into all the different things that are thought to be the cause of Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Rather, I suggest you use your intuition at this point. What do you know to be true about Chronic Fatigue Syndrome? Have you ever had an idea why you have CFS? Of course you cannot know for sure that the cause you ascribed CFS to is THE cause, until you have recovered. In this post I am going to share an excerpt from my book that addresses this basic question: WHY?
It was at the end of 2005 that I felt that I had come to the crux of the problem. I finally understood that my bodymind was trying to tell me that I was low in self-confidence and was not living my life the way I wanted to. In retrospect it has become clear that this lack of self-confidence and everything it involved had in its core extremely fearful feelings and beliefs about life and the world around me. It was these feelings and beliefs that needed to be healed and replaced by healthier ones for full recovery to happen. The healing journey meant a lot of inner work – I had to delve into the areas of my mind and life that I didn't feel comfortable about; I had to see things I didn't want to see and had been ignoring, and I had to radically change how I relate to myself, other people and life in general. Healing meant a complete turnaround for me – from being stuck in emotional suffering to feeling good and being happy. The healing force that drove me through the process of recovery continues up to this day to heal the emotions and the body, bringing more peace, joy and happiness into the experience of life. The same force is available to you if you choose it.
Like the father of Western medicine, Hippocrates once wrote:
"The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well."
The news cannot be any better – there is a healing force that is way more powerful than anything we can accomplish by effort, and it's free and always available. This is valuable knowledge that helps you to get well if you keep it in your mind and heart. The well-known example of placebo effect confirms this as well. We have the ability to heal ourselves naturally, without any outside force and by belief alone. The healing force inside of you is waiting to be tapped into – you just have to be ready for healing and transformation.
But what, then, is stopping you from recovery? This is the question to ask and one of the main things my book addresses. When I was rewriting the manuscript, I tried to sum up the process of recovery in one simple sentence and came up with the following: removing all obstacles to feeling good. It is not to be taken superficially, e.g. "Positive thinking and changing my attitude will make me feel better." Those things have their role in healing, but it is necessary to go deeper than that. Healing means transformation not only on the mental level but also (and mainly) on emotional and energetic levels. If something happened to you – a physical assault, emotionally difficult relationship or something else that affected you strongly, it did not only affect your thinking mind, but the whole bodymind organism, including emotions. And that is where the issues are stored – in your body and energy system. The events of our life and the emotions they brought about are often very deep-seated and need more than just positive thinking or small changes in behavior to be cleared. Luckily, there are techniques that help us deal with even the most persistent and deep-seated problems relatively easily and painlessly. Once the emotional/energetic imbalances are corrected, healing happens naturally. Or to put it another way: healing means correcting the emotional/energetic imbalances and dealing with negative emotions and attitudes. Also, there may be unconscious beliefs like "I cannot get well" or even "I don't want to get well." These have to be dealt with, too. There may be many obstacles to healing, but there is nothing that cannot be overcome. If you make up your mind and really decide to restore your health, healing will come about.
You might ask how does emotional healing cure a condition like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which is physical, not psychological? The answer is simple: mind and body are one. In other words they are one whole (the term "holistic" refers to this). If you affect one aspect of the whole, the other one will change as well. The idea of mind-body medicine is based on the fact that our energies, thoughts, emotions and beliefs are connected and have a direct physiological effect on our bodies. The Chinese have known it from ancient times and there has never been a mind/body dichotomy in Chinese medicine. It's all connected. Psychology, physiology, biology and biography are all one integrated realm. Mind-body medicine is an art of healing that views human beings as naturally healthy. It's just the obstacles to being healthy (our natural condition) that have to be removed. The important thing to understand is that psychological and emotional work has a lot of impact on how we feel on the physical level. In fact, what we call "physical level" is a manifestation of our thoughts, beliefs and emotions – the things that go on in our minds reflected in our everyday experience, including our physical wellbeing.
"The mind is everything. What you think you become."
- The Buddha
Working on the emotional issues from our past (biography) changes our thoughts and emotions (psychology) so that there is no more stuckness ("energetic disruption" or "energy blocks") around the events and consequently no physical discomfort (resulting from these events) in our bodies. Or we can reverse it by saying: working on the physical issues in our body we get in touch with our biography, and by healing it and making peace with it we let the healing happen. Hopefully you will have a first-hand experience of it very soon.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a real challenge, but it is possible to overcome. If you felt any truth in the above, I suggest you try what I did. You can start by reading my book "A Manual for Dealing with CFS," which is available on my website.
It was at the end of 2005 that I felt that I had come to the crux of the problem. I finally understood that my bodymind was trying to tell me that I was low in self-confidence and was not living my life the way I wanted to. In retrospect it has become clear that this lack of self-confidence and everything it involved had in its core extremely fearful feelings and beliefs about life and the world around me. It was these feelings and beliefs that needed to be healed and replaced by healthier ones for full recovery to happen. The healing journey meant a lot of inner work – I had to delve into the areas of my mind and life that I didn't feel comfortable about; I had to see things I didn't want to see and had been ignoring, and I had to radically change how I relate to myself, other people and life in general. Healing meant a complete turnaround for me – from being stuck in emotional suffering to feeling good and being happy. The healing force that drove me through the process of recovery continues up to this day to heal the emotions and the body, bringing more peace, joy and happiness into the experience of life. The same force is available to you if you choose it.
Like the father of Western medicine, Hippocrates once wrote:
"The natural healing force within each one of us is the greatest force in getting well."
The news cannot be any better – there is a healing force that is way more powerful than anything we can accomplish by effort, and it's free and always available. This is valuable knowledge that helps you to get well if you keep it in your mind and heart. The well-known example of placebo effect confirms this as well. We have the ability to heal ourselves naturally, without any outside force and by belief alone. The healing force inside of you is waiting to be tapped into – you just have to be ready for healing and transformation.
But what, then, is stopping you from recovery? This is the question to ask and one of the main things my book addresses. When I was rewriting the manuscript, I tried to sum up the process of recovery in one simple sentence and came up with the following: removing all obstacles to feeling good. It is not to be taken superficially, e.g. "Positive thinking and changing my attitude will make me feel better." Those things have their role in healing, but it is necessary to go deeper than that. Healing means transformation not only on the mental level but also (and mainly) on emotional and energetic levels. If something happened to you – a physical assault, emotionally difficult relationship or something else that affected you strongly, it did not only affect your thinking mind, but the whole bodymind organism, including emotions. And that is where the issues are stored – in your body and energy system. The events of our life and the emotions they brought about are often very deep-seated and need more than just positive thinking or small changes in behavior to be cleared. Luckily, there are techniques that help us deal with even the most persistent and deep-seated problems relatively easily and painlessly. Once the emotional/energetic imbalances are corrected, healing happens naturally. Or to put it another way: healing means correcting the emotional/energetic imbalances and dealing with negative emotions and attitudes. Also, there may be unconscious beliefs like "I cannot get well" or even "I don't want to get well." These have to be dealt with, too. There may be many obstacles to healing, but there is nothing that cannot be overcome. If you make up your mind and really decide to restore your health, healing will come about.
You might ask how does emotional healing cure a condition like Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, which is physical, not psychological? The answer is simple: mind and body are one. In other words they are one whole (the term "holistic" refers to this). If you affect one aspect of the whole, the other one will change as well. The idea of mind-body medicine is based on the fact that our energies, thoughts, emotions and beliefs are connected and have a direct physiological effect on our bodies. The Chinese have known it from ancient times and there has never been a mind/body dichotomy in Chinese medicine. It's all connected. Psychology, physiology, biology and biography are all one integrated realm. Mind-body medicine is an art of healing that views human beings as naturally healthy. It's just the obstacles to being healthy (our natural condition) that have to be removed. The important thing to understand is that psychological and emotional work has a lot of impact on how we feel on the physical level. In fact, what we call "physical level" is a manifestation of our thoughts, beliefs and emotions – the things that go on in our minds reflected in our everyday experience, including our physical wellbeing.
"The mind is everything. What you think you become."
- The Buddha
Working on the emotional issues from our past (biography) changes our thoughts and emotions (psychology) so that there is no more stuckness ("energetic disruption" or "energy blocks") around the events and consequently no physical discomfort (resulting from these events) in our bodies. Or we can reverse it by saying: working on the physical issues in our body we get in touch with our biography, and by healing it and making peace with it we let the healing happen. Hopefully you will have a first-hand experience of it very soon.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a real challenge, but it is possible to overcome. If you felt any truth in the above, I suggest you try what I did. You can start by reading my book "A Manual for Dealing with CFS," which is available on my website.
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