It’s really important to reframe how we look at ourself while we are healing. We need to be careful not to put ourselves in a box under ‘chronic illness’, file ourself as ‘unwell’ or ‘permanently ill’. The more we define ourselves by any unfavourable state that we find our body is in, no matter how bad we are talking, the more we become enslaved to that way of being.

One of the ways we can start off spirals of ill health and negative thinking is focusing on the negative. We can generally embody the whole “Woe is me” mindset because, let’s face it, some symptoms really do suck and no ones likes a limited life.

What are your boundaries all about?

You can understand your boundaries as your sense of self and that can be impinged upon in many ways both externally and internally.

I’ve spoken about making a mental pin drop of where you are trying to go in your life and always having that in the back of your mind to set your direction. Another way of aligning yourself to your future is about thinking about what is your core message, what is it in essence that you are trying to do?

Its not something you are probably thinking about when you’re in the process of trying to fix what is going on with you. You might have a distant dream of what healing looks like, just as I did, as a time where I would be symptom-free and off all medication. But actually can be huge challenges which really need to be part of your process, and which are good to be prepared for.

When you look back at the traumas you have suffered in your lifetime- pretty much everyone’s at some point involves having your boundaries crossed in some way. If you’ve been verbally, physically or emotionally abused, disrespected, or neglected at any point these are all ways that your boundaries have been transgressed. But there are other slightly less obvious ways that your boundaries may have been damaged that we tend to not see in ourselves.

One of the emotions that can wreak havoc in your body is also one that hides itself the best. It’s often the last emotional thread to untangle in the process I use because of its ability to hide. But there are sometimes ways of preventing it from getting stuck there in the first place.

I met someone recently and when I explained what I did and that I helped people heal their diseases and they smiled and said knowingly, “Let me guess, is it something to do with the microbiome?”.

No two person’s healing looks the same. I cannot say this enough. There is no one technique or process that I teach that fixes a certain imbalance in everyone. No - just do X and Y will be sorted. There are similarities to be sure in many people’s healing, but we are all unique humans with our own histories and different systems and so those need to be addressed specifically and individually. The absolute key to this process is the individualised approach.

A lot of my work can involve going back and focusing in on specific emotions that can be held at certain ages from childhood. But what if you can’t remember your childhood? And why is that?

Despite my love of blueberries I’m not a massive fan of superfoods because they aren’t super for everyone. We are all individual humans with individual needs and those fluctuate daily so its pointless to prescribe a one-size-fits-all approach. Even coffee is a superfood for some - full of antioxidants, but for others it would act like a toxin. The process I use and teach is completely individualised but my aim on here is to give information that is helpful to everyone.

At my worst when my brain fog was so bad I struggled to even finish reading a single sentence. It is one of those hard-to-articulate symptoms that is quietly devastating and one of the biggest hurdles to navigate because you literally cannot THINK past it. Couple that with fatigue, and I honestly wonder how I managed to work out how to recover.

One of my clients this past week was talking about how she’d always been looking for the magic bullet. It really resonated with me since I spent ages ricocheting from one magic solution to another - be that various dietary restrictions, far infra-red therapy, specific breath work, trauma release exercises, neural retraining programs, genetics analysis, magnesium therapies. This is not an exhaustive list…

Arguably one of the hardest things to face with chronic illness is dealing with hope. I received a recent email that really resonated with me that said that after so many years of illness, it’s not so much the loss of money at all the failed interventions (however galling), but how fragile your hope is and how painful it is to have it crushed, cumulatively so.

Legumes - one of nature’s superfoods, mineral-rich, full of loads of beautiful cancer-fighting nutrients, tasty, versatile, and better in your burgers than meat. We’ve been consuming them since humans started tilling the land and yet we don’t consume them in the ways that we used to that took advantage of these great properties but I am going to show you how and it’s incredibly simple.

One of the reasons it’s problematic to talk about the benefits or disadvantages of eating foods such as dairy is that it can create a potentially bigger problem around the food itself which is fear. Fear and belief have such an astounding affect in the body, and information about a food can start creating beliefs in the body which then become self-fulfilling.

When it comes to the decision of buying organic vs. non-organic milk, the benefits of avoiding pesticides are widely known, as well as their environmental repercussions on our soil and its ability to capture carbon. However have you ever considered whether to buy pasteurised or unpasteurised dairy and what effect that may have on you?

Talking about whether to eat dairy is a contentious topic so I’m treading carefully now and addressing this purely from the angle of the effect it has in your body - my aim here is about providing information rather than prescribing, so that everyone can make their own decisions.

So your gut microbiome needs an overhaul - or may your child’s does. It’s likely the whole family does if your child does since children’s microbiome are largely similar to those of their parents. Here is how to do it:

Is the gut really the key to your health or chronic illness? Perhaps not, I will explain.

Ever since the term ‘microbiome’ was coined in 2001 we have been slowly learning more about the ways that the balance of our intestinal flora, our microscopic bacteria and yeasts play a role in our digestion, immune system and even our thoughts. Its often the place that is analysed first when you are trying to get to the root of your digestive issues with specialists.