When I was 27, I came back from a trip to South East Asia and quickly realised something was wrong.
I had picked up a tummy bug that made my life very difficult for many years to come.
Having previously taken my health for granted, I suddenly recognised that without food health I had nothing.
In the (nearly) 17 years since that trip, I had tried a LOT of things to improve myself.
I've tried more supplements and herbs and tinctures than I can probably name.
I've tried all manner of prescribed drugs (that possibly made my gut health worse).
I've tried restrictive diets that reduced the incidences of painful pangs but also reduced my eating options everywhere, often making life difficult for others.
In the last few years I've been more focused on learning how to heal my nervous system, resolve past trauma and basically clean up old emotional baggage.
I'm sure all of this has helped, if only in that I now love myself more and find it easily to eat in a genuinely healthy, kind way.
Less binging equals less gas and bloating equals less knife-in-the-belly pain.
But what's been really interesting is the recent addition to my arsenal: sound healing.
I tripped over the power of biofield tuning (with tuning forks) earlier this year and I've been slowly but regularly doing sound healing sessions on my body(-mind-field) mostly through pre-recorded audio sessions.
Over the last two weeks I've been doing one series that Eileen McKusick, founder of Biofield Tuning and all round amazing human, herself strongly recommended.
In fact, in more than one interview I heard her say that when she finally trained one of her students on how to do this particular treatment and got them to do it to her, that her whole life changed.
That might seem a little extreme and perhaps exaggerated but Eileen is not one who is prone to hyperbole.
So, I bought this series, that works specifically on the adrenals (the tiny glands that sit atop out kidneys and are responsible for adrenaline and cortisol release into the body) and have been very slowly working may way through them.
After completing the first of the three sessions, I felt like I started sleeping, on average, better and waking up more well rested than I have in.. I don't know how long.
I also feel like, on average, my bowel movements have been better and easier. It might seem weird for me to tell you about my pooping habits but after 17 years of struggling to have happy, healthy bowel movements this is wonderful.
If you've never struggled to go to the loo easily you may not know how much our gut health affects our mental health. Try finding mental clarity or motivation when you can't let go of the waste stuck inside of you. It's f*cking hard.
Now, I'm cautiously optimistic. I've had brief periods of time, many times, in the last 17 years where there's been a noticeable improvement and it hasn't lasted.
Sometimes the improvements have been so dramatic they felt like a miracle. But things have almost always reverted to the way they were, the changes didn't stick.
But I'm optimistic because Eileen is teaching me (through her free and low cost resources) things that make SO much logical sense, that connect so many dots I've been collecting for all this time, and she has SO much evidence on the efficacy of this modality.
More to share down the track if things keep getting better and better.
But for now, photos of today's run, which I managed to do because I actually had the energy and the motivation to do it, because I slept well and woke well rested.
What a blessing.
Screenshots from Garmin Connect.