Autoimmune Illness and Lyme Disease Recovery Guide

Mending the Body, Mind, and Spirit

Katina I. Makris

• Publisher: Skyhorse
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781632204448
• eBook ISBN: 9781632207579
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Medicine Biographies

Don't let an autoimmune disorder leave you torn apart—learn to mend from the inside out. The occurrence of autoimmune illnesses has spiked dramatically over the last forty years. MS, rheumatoid arthritis, and fibromyalgia are plaguing people worldwide. The suffering is vast, and the dependency on medication and the amount of physician care involved are overwhelming the health-care system. Most disturbing is that people do not necessarily heal from diseases like lupus or chronic fatigue syndrome—they merely manage their disability.Katina I. Makris, veteran natural health-care practitioner and former sufferer of CFS, fibromyalgia, and Lyme, carefully explains the mechanisms at play with autoimmune illness. "The body is not compartmentalized into illness symptomology, but is integrated and whole; the mind-body-spirit are entwined as one, searching for balance or homeostasis, " she writes. With clear insight into our seven energy chakra centers and the correlation to our bodily systems and specific emotional interplay, Autoimmune Illness and Lyme Disease Recovery Guide is a manual and workbook, educating readers on the role of Integrative Medicine and dietary and lifestyle management for optimizing recovery potentials, as well as how to ignite the mind-body healing pathway. Makris shows us how to attune to the innate healing gifts we all bear. Instead of being fragmented and dependent on outside sources such as drugs and doctors, the tools Makris offers teach us how to mend ourselves—because when we are whole, we are well.

PART I

Health and Healing

WHAT IS MY ROLE IN MY RECOVERY?

All individuals with autoimmune illness and Lyme disease are being asked to take a “time out” from life. Like a monk in his cave or the person who spends thousands of dollars to go on an idyllic yoga retreat, you are being asked at the level of body, mind, and spirit to take a retreat from your way of living and your acts of doing.

This illness shines the light on you. The persistence, the discomfort, the “foreign” feelings are real. They are wake-up calls to you that you can no longer run this template any more. It is not working for you, as your body and psyche have reacted strongly enough that you cannot ignore or push through matters any longer. No drug will make the symptoms go away and stay away. The anti-inflammatories, analgesics, mood enhancers, or antibiotics are only temporary fixes.

The real truth is that physically, your adrenal glands likely are being depleted and have tipped your entire endocrine system off-gear. Or the inflammation cascade is running out of control. Or maybe your body pH is too acidic, and microbes and fungi are overpopulating you internally. Perhaps food sensitivities exist, or heavy metals and chemicals burden you with toxins. There is an assortment of nutrient deficiencies, leading to your genetic “flaws” being triggered and showcased. Or, most intrinsically, you are doing something that goes “against your grain” and does not meet your heart’s desire. Spiritually you are in crisis, because who knows how to mend a broken spirit?

In mending from chronic disease, the emotional and spiritual sides of the condition need as much attention as the physical. No being is one-dimensional; we are intricate, elastic, and always searching for homeostasis, or balance. Most importantly, our heart bears desire, and listening within to its callings is central for recovery.

Now I reach out my hand to you. Please take it. I am here to help. Let me guide you. We will walk together, now. You do not have to do this alone. I have been in your shoes. I know the ropes and can lead you out safely. I am here to bring you solace, to inspire you to try some new paths to wholeness. Besides offering you some tools and insights, I bring you hope. Because, if I went from bedridden and wheelchair-bound with CFS/ME for a decade, to vibrant and healthy and swimming a mile with ease, so can you!

The human being is amazingly resilient and adaptive when we provide it with the proper measures in the right environment. There are many wonderful books available on autoimmune disorders. However, this is the first book you will read that brings you in concert with your inner healing powers. You will not be sorry you read this book.

Some of you will say this sounds too simple to be effective, others will trust only the highest-pedigreed medical professionals, and others of you will say, “This book has given me my life back.” You may have all of these reactions or others entirely. Ultimately, I share this knowledge because I care. I care about you, and anyone who has become ill and lost their way. Being alone or sick or scared is an awful feeling. Tragedy occurs much too often, in too many lives. Still, we can heal and grow and bloom anew with the right support.

These pages lay out some very essential aspects regarding health, illness, healing, and wellness. We look at the autoimmune and Lyme disease spectrum. We come to understand why these conditions have likely surfaced in you. I am helping to empower you. For you are responsible for taking an active role in your recovery. You can reclaim your health and well-being.

But, you must make a commitment. That commitment is to yourself, because you need the care, the attention, and the peace in order to get well. I will ask you to make some changes in your daily life, and encourage you to try some different options in lifestyle and healthcare. I do not have all the answers. My wisdom tells me you are eager to heal and curious about options. Most specifically, you want to gain control over these runaway symptoms. You feel like your body is out of your control, hijacked. And, in some ways, that is true.

What is also true is that you have access to inner reserves, which will shift your energy around, so that we can harness some of it for mending, and free the rest of it up for your healthier future.

Your role in recovery is to start paying attention to yourself and your lifestyle in new ways. Following the trends of our unhealthy, chemically laden food industry, pharmaceutical-based medical system, and electromagnetically saturated daily life is not supportive to the delicate workings of the endocrine, immune, and nervous systems. Twenty, thirty, forty years of GMO food in our grocery stores, too many chemical additives in cosmetics and leached from plastic bottles, and cling wrap have accumulated in your body.

Making conscious choices to eat organic foods (especially animal products—dairy, meat, poultry, fish) is important. So is removing the microwave, the cordless and cell phones, and the electronics from your bedroom. Your role in recovery involves becoming conscious about how harmful these associated influences become when tallied up.

Additionally, seeking out a top-rate, certified clinical nutritionist (CCN), naturopathic physician (ND), and/or integrative or functional medicine doctor is essential, for these type of practitioners will know what specialty labs to use for assessing your associated depletions, as well as how to remove heavy metals with chelation, and microbes such as Borrelia burgdorferi (Lyme disease), parasites, fungi, and the too common CFS/fibromyalgia/MS viruses of EBV, cytomeglia, etc.

Most essentially, following the healing exercises outlined in Part V of this book is crucial. Entering the domain of personal transformation and using the simple, yet powerful inner healing tools I teach you can be truly effective. I would not have made a complete recovery if I did not delve so deeply and consistently into these practices. They have been sacred, used for generations, and “forgotten” somehow in the last fifty years, just as these autoimmune-style illnesses started surfacing.

The time has come for you to gain control of your body, emotions, and mind. The mind is your most valuable asset. Using it wisely is critical. Part of my job in these pages is to help you hone your mind to turn on the healing pathway. You are capable of this. In fact, the promise for attaining these skills is very exciting.

Be positive. Recognize the opportunity. Do not be afraid or leery; these emotions will only limit or block your success. Open yourself up to discovery and embrace change, for anything is possible in your lifetime. You can create your healthier future. Physicians do not hold all the tools. More than half of the resources for healing exist inside you.

Honor your Self. Say, “Thank you, I am still alive.” Look at what you do have; even if it is not very much, it is a starting place. Be grateful for the moment that is now, for this is an awakening and every day, every breath, every thought is a new opportunity. And, you can kindle new cell growth, new energy, a new future. Your ability to shift your thoughts will ignite the mind-body healing pathway. Together we will make strides.

I believe in you. You are strong and brave and beautiful. If no one has told you that in a while, I am reminding you now. The fact that you are reading this book illustrates this. Let us honor your healing journey. Keep a notebook or journal if it helps you, or use the blank pages at the end of this book. This guide is meant to help you keep pace with your recovery. You can run free again, beyond the pain and suffering and weakness. Have hope and trust in your future, and yourself. Believe.

THE BIGGER PICTURE

Think of a time period, or even just a day in your life, when you were in perfect health, filled with energy, happy, radiant, and enthused or inspired. Is the image of you one of your youth, as a child or teenager, a college-aged student? Or older perhaps, thriving in your twenties, thirties, forties, or later yet, your fifties or sixties? Close your eyes, glean this image of yourself. See your surroundings, the expression on your face, what you were doing, and were you alone or with others? Can you feel the weather, sense the lighting, see what you were wearing? Capture this time and place and essence of you right now.

Give credence to the enormous vitality, love, and beauty you embodied and actually still do, even if now you are encumbered with health issues, symptoms of discomfort, or emotional strife. That image we just retrieved—that time and place and true essence of you—is real and alive and what you were born to be and thrive as. Your spirit, your body, your emotional being is alive, or you would not be reading these words. Remember that image in your mind’s eye; we will visit it daily from now on.

We are unique, wondrous, capable, and amazingly resilient beings. We have a very mighty organ called the brain, filled with enormous abilities and powers. The body we were genetically given is complex and essentially “self-righting,” always trying to recalibrate and return to balance or homeostasis when moved into different environments or climactic conditions or when exposed to toxins, chemicals, microbes, and the energies of emotions. We often forget just how miraculous the human being is; sensing, adjusting, defending, and all internal systems working in complex synchronicity to maintain health and well-being. I marvel at our tremendous skills.

The human body alone is miraculous! The typical person is comprised of 206 bones, more than 600 skeletal muscles, five vital organs, six quarts of blood, roughly ninety pounds of water/fluids, twenty-eight feet of intestines, approximately 60,000 miles of blood vessels, forty-five miles of nerves, ten trillion cells, and energy states of so many mutable forms. If we could measure us in “wattage,” like a forty- or hundred-watt lightbulb, we could better assess ourselves than merely by considering our looks, our health status, our career success.

Take a quick assessment of yourself and sense the energetic difference of feeling depressed and the dim energy wattage you express versus the brilliant glare of a brainstorming, creative moment when you are on high-beam energy output of a hundred-plus watts. They are quite different, aren’t they?

Our emotional feelings obviously possess energy. Again, I ask you to sense within yourself for a few minutes. Close your eyes and recall yourself feeling sad. I see myself lying on my green floral print living room sofa, limp and lethargic, sadness weighing me down, tears on my eyelashes. I feel weak and deflated, with little energy and a depression setting in. My heart is broken. In fact, energetically I feel like I am lying on the bottom of the ocean floor or way down deep at the base of a well. I have very little energy output. I don’t even want to lift my arm. My breathing feels tiring. I am withdrawn.

I contrast this to another energy state—anger. Anger may not be the most desirable emotion, and we know it can create destructive forces or propel us to outbursts. Anger has an energy form and when we do not stifle it, but express it, there is intense output; motion and even heat associated. Some people yell, others kick and throw things. Uncontrolled, impulsive anger can induce a brawl or act of violence. If an unsuspecting person walks into a room where an angry person stands, even if they are still, you can perceive the energy of their anger. It may make you suddenly feel tense, frightened, super alert. This is very different than the flaccid energy of sadness. Anger is taut and high wattage.

I want to have you journey inside one more time now—let’s seek out love. Close your eyes if it helps. Put your hand over your heart, take a few deep breaths, quiet your thinking. Recall yourself in love. Are you young and enamored of someone beautiful in your opinion? Or is it your newborn child you are enthralled with? Are you entwined in the roaring emotional and sexual chemistry of a mate or partner you cannot stay away from, racing to their side at any opportunity?

Love is so very powerful. See and feel that being who you opened your heart so fully to. How do you feel when you draw up this image of yourself? Love fills us, it empowers us, it makes us expand and extend beyond our selves; overflowing and bathed in an aura of magic.

The baby’s tiny wiggling fingers, your mate’s sunny smile, the warmth of your lover’s breath on your neck. We feel good in these moments and we never want the feelings to stop. Our energy state glows like that hundred-watt lightbulb in full-spectrum glory!

I have asked you to visit these energy states for a reason. The reason is that as human beings (as part of the mammal kingdom), we are able to generate and express emotions. Our emotional fabric is real, valid, and entwined with our physical body; that phenomenal structure of bones and organs and cells.

Sometime in the 1900s, Western medicine decided to study and treat symptoms and illnesses in a methodology called science. The emotional and physical interplay of our whole person/being was actually disregarded and in certain decades ridiculed. Doctoring became a practice of focusing merely on physical symptoms, their constellation patterns labeled as disease diagnosis. Each generation to follow became more and more disconnected from the profound wellspring of our inner healing powers and actually relinquished self-ability and turned their body over to a physician at the mere commencement of symptoms, to be “fixed” with an externally applied modality; pharmaceuticals, surgery, “expert opinion.”

The norm for mid- to late-century 1900s USA came to regard medical physicians as very knowing, powerful people whom we seek at great expense to help us when distressed. Centuries prior, the clergy held such status. In the Renaissance, artists were revered with gifts and powers. Indigenous cultures and BC tribes valued shamans and magi with their ability to move energy states and cull visions. Centuries revolve and societies morph. Now in the early phase of the twenty-first century, we are a Western world population of chronically “ill” people.

The average American fills twelve to fifteen drug prescriptions annually. Our country had a retail over-the-counter pharmaceutical trade of $96 billion in 2012 and, according to Time magazine statistics from 2009, we have begun seeking the use of alternative medicine to the tune of $40 billion annually. On the world health order status, the USA ranks the lowest amongst the eleven richest nations, lagging behind other countries such as England, Switzerland, and Sweden, and with small countries such as Malta and Singapore in top rankings.

Many factors coalesce, crippling modern America with massive case numbers of chronic disease and autoimmune illness. Since the 1950s we have witnessed a frightening spike in MS, lupus, Crohn’s disease, food allergies, and autism in children, and the raging infectious illness epidemic of Lyme disease.

Some sectors chalk it up to lack of awareness fifty years ago, yet most of us instinctively know an amalgam of factors that have induced the maelstrom of suffering that more than 50 percent of adults age thirty and older are afflicted with. The disturbing reality is that we are less healthy than our parents and grandparents born prior to World War II who smoked, drank, and ate fats liberally. They were reared prior to processed foods and were rarely vaccinated. Smallpox was the only vaccine injected into their bloodstreams. They did not intake hydrogenated oils daily until the 1950s.

These generations ate fruits and vegetables typically “in season,” consumed an heirloom non-GMO wheat, were electric-magnetic field-free, and didn’t live in the radius of a nuclear power plant until they were adults. With one- (or no-) car households, their pace of living was radically slower, meaning their adrenal glands (fight-or-flight stress mechanism) did not have to sprint routinely during freeway high-speed commutes, multitask to dual-career households, or fret over “dropped” mobile business calls in mid-sentence.

So, the lard and the bourbon and the cigars may have “taxed” their bodies, but not nearly as intensely as the 112 additives consumed daily in foods, soft drinks, and fluoridated water that our kids also absorb. Once we stir in the emotional energy states highlighted a few pages ago, a picture is being painted—we have a physically over-polluted body, which swims with often very potent negative energy states. Our jobs, our relationships, and our lifestyles commonly are peppered with stress, whiplash pace, soaring demands, and unresolved conflicts.

The chapters to come will illustrate the very obvious correlation between both extreme emotional feeling states or prolonged emotional feeling states, as relates to illness and symptomology. We are not divided up into parts, but woven together in a cohesive tapestry. We are beautiful, creative, sensitive creatures who thrive when love, compassion, support, cooperation, and freedoms are provided. Our creative output, our health and well-being, and states of love and joy have been radically compromised.

Though as dour as this scenario sounds, there is hope! We can be healthy and vibrant and even recover from a panoply of symptoms and conditions. Remember—you are capable of resiliency! We manufacture new cells every day of our lives. The older, toxic ones can be replaced with fresh, healthier newbies. Your organs and glands can be nourished and replenished from their depletions. Damages can even be corrected in many instances.

The good news in the gateway of this twenty-first century is that we now have terrific restorative supplements available to us from high-quality sources. The synergistic healing properties of natural plants and their centuries-old effectiveness are returning to healthcare. A strong movement toward organic, non-processed food is resurfacing, and most precious to each and every one of us is the truth that we bear innate healing powers. That glorious brain I noted houses a true gift—your mind. And, we can access its enormous healing prowess.

As a youn...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Part I Health and Healing
• Part II Overview of Autoimmune Illnesses and Lyme Disease
• Part III Healing Disciplines
• Part IV Recovery Guide
• Part V The Map
• Part VI Mind-Spirit
• In Closing
• Appendix 1: Lyme Disease Symptom Chart
• Appendix 2: Pain Management & Antimicrobials for Autoimmune & Lyme Diseases
• Appendix 3: Autoimmune & Lyme Disease-Related Resources
• Index