SPEAKER_01: hey everyone raymond here i am so excited as always as i am when i have stories like this to share with you i have rebecca toland with me she's in san diego so we're both in california which made scheduling this incredibly easy so grateful that she's joining me here today to talk to all of you here on my channel about her journey with any cfs she was unwell with any cfs for thirteen years before finally fully recovering so she's got a lot of really great stuff to share so i'm really excited about this thank you so much rebecca for taking the time to do

SPEAKER_00: oh it's such a pleasure ray lynn i've watched your channel recently and i'm just so touched by the heart you put into it it's really clear that you're just here to support people and just offer all the different ways that helped you and helped others recover so i'm happy to share my story

SPEAKER_01: i appreciate you saying that yeah it's really it's all the people like yourself put in time and effort and courage to talk about their story publicly like this

SPEAKER_01: thank you very much yeah you were here to talk about your health journey so let's get into it can take us back to this all begin yeah

SPEAKER_00: well before the symptoms started i was in my early thirties i was tv news reporter so i had like a very busy high powered stressful job but when i really enjoyed i did a lot of international travel i socialized a lot so i was busy i exercised it kind of did all the things that you think of doing in your early thirties and

SPEAKER_00: i actually went on a trip to asia just for leisure but i ended up having a really traumatic experience when i was over there i was sexually assaulted and that led to a really grueling urinary tract infection that i got on a seventeen hour plane trip back and my whole system just kind of blacked out i actually sort of lost consciousness on the plane it was really an awful experience and when i got back to the states i was just really exhausted but i was still able to work and i still kind of pushed through things and i went to a few doctors i really sort of blocked out the trauma and i wasn't able to process that on a conscious emotional level and then strangely the next year around the same time of year it was like late fall i went back to asia and i was questioning the trip because i wasn't feeling that well that time i got these three colds kind of like back to back one was when i was there in china one was on the plane trip back and then one was once i returned back to san diego and then my system completely crashed after that i just went totally kaput i felt like i had the flu twenty four seven i had a lot of the quintessential me c f s symptoms i couldn't sleep at all overnight which was really the insomnia was a grueling one for me i was so exhausted for a number of weeks and even months i would say that i could hardly just walk around the house the brain fog was really bad i felt like i couldn't remember the name of you know a good friend or a colleague digestive issues i also started getting hot flashes and kind of like pre menopausal symptoms even though i was so young so that's kind of how all it began in a nutshell

SPEAKER_01: so what did you think when all this started happening

SPEAKER_00: you know i was so scared ray lynn i was just really i'm sure like you and so many people can relate i was just terrified because although i had had some fatigue it started really coming on very suddenly after those viruses

SPEAKER_00: and i didn't in any way think about the trauma that had happened to me or actually a previous similar assault that happened when i was nineteen none of that was in my awareness i really was just wanting to get well so i did use whatever strength i have to start researching and going to doctors and basically my mom was driving me around because i couldn't really drive or do anything i was really lucky that i lived in the same town as my parents and i sort of just started urgently going to doctors everything from allopathic medicine to natural path medicine to integrative medicine at that point to some specialists and they did diagnose me with any c f s which at that time was largely called chronic fatigue syndrome more than the me post viral syndrome some of them would say there was some fibromyalgia in there because of all the body pain although that also can be very typical with with c f s

SPEAKER_00: and i think i remember thinking on the one hand i was relieved to have a diagnosis because i suddenly couldn't go to work i had to just tell my boss well you know i used to be someone who would work like sixty hours a week and i just i can't go to work anymore so it sort of helped me in that way but on the other hand it was really devastating because i remember particularly a natural path a doctor who i had so much faith in and i thought well he's you know he's natural he's going to help me recover in a really gentle way and he specialized in this diagnosis and he actually said like we we don't know what the causes and we there is no cure and really you're going to have to live with this i mean that's all i can tell you and i just remember bawling you know being so devastated and really feeling like this was just this death sentence but in a way a life sentence that i was given that i would have to live with for years

SPEAKER_01: when you got this diagnosis

SPEAKER_00: i don't think so i mean it wasn't something that i didn't know anyone that had c f s maybe distantly i had heard of it but i really didn't know much about it and of course the diagnosis chronic fatigue syndrome sounds like you're just you just need a nap but my life was like feeling like i had the flu twenty four seven and i couldn't even sleep that was really hard because i never got any relief from the symptoms i would usually sleep like a couple hours a night but no it was really new to me and i you know i had been a reporter so i started researching as much as i could and seen as many doctors as i could over really what became the next thirteen years

SPEAKER_01: initial times to any of these doctors or practitioners that you were seeing recommend any sort of treatment

SPEAKER_00: yeah there there were all kinds of things i mean like you i think i was on tons of supplements i was on probably forty or fifty different supplements at one time and i had all my little baggies and pillboxes lined up i didn't really ever see a change with that i went to dio a doctor of osteopathy who also practiced homeopathy and she put me on the anti candida diet so actually for years i wasn't even eating you know carrots or any grains or anything like that which really wasn't a diet that i liked i had been mainly plant based before but i was willing to do whatever and those things weren't making a difference so then i started really going to more specialists neurologists endocrinologist rheumatologists the rheumatologist actually suggested antiviral intervenious drugs and i had been a bit more natural but of course i was willing to try anything so i really thought this was going to work and my entire system crashed i ended up back in bed for months after those medications

SPEAKER_00: i had done a lot of iv vitamins i got really into our your veda and i do think that kind of helped me live a little more healthy balanced life and start moving back into more plant foods but it didn't shift the symptoms i went to all kinds of energy healers and i actually did see a little relief with some of the energy healers but it would just be very short lived and i would kind of go back to my baseline oh gosh i went to even sleep psych their sleep psychologists their sleep doctors by the way there's every kind of sleep expert and that was still a really vexing symptom when i wouldn't sleep the symptoms would be a lot worse the next day and eventually i started going to see some psychologists because i was starting to connect

SPEAKER_00: there was a lot of psychological you know trauma and grief that happened before the onset of these symptoms and in these years i should say not to sound like this is such a sob story but i know you really place a value on just being honest with our stories there was a lot of personal griefs my father was very ill and eventually passed away about five years into my illness my mother almost died and they were like my rocks i was single engagement had broken up because it was just so hard to sustain you know he didn't he couldn't really understand why i couldn't do anything anymore i was about to lose my house i had lost the career i really loved so it was just there was a lot going on and now what what i know in how i healed i see how all those emotional stressors were really activating my brain and nervous system and making the symptoms worse i didn't really make those connections at the time but i do think some psychotherapy was helpful just to kind of talk through some of these some of these griefs that were going on

SPEAKER_01: a lot of heavy hard things you're hit with i'm so sorry that you have to go through all of that how did this impact you know emotionally psychologically people understandably start feeling severe depression what was

SPEAKER_00: thank you for acknowledging that i think those of us who go through this need to be acknowledged and a lot of times are really not in the health care system we're just sort of this body that is trying to get better but at times i fell into some depression i'm lucky in that i never say deep into a depression and i never really actively thought about taking my life but i remember just years where i felt like what's the point of living at all i mean on doing is taking these supplements like eating foods i don't even like for what i have no purpose anymore it was really hard to socialize too because when i would it would activate symptoms so i wasn't doing a whole lot of that other than a couple close friends and family that would come visit so it did take its toll i think though for the most part i was able to kind of keep some just some hope and some optimism although doctors were saying we don't have a cure there was something in me that was like but this isn't me like this isn't my life this is not how it's going to go i know that there's something that can get well there's something in me even that is well and that can heal on this physical level and i was always a somewhat spiritual person but i started meditating and really practicing yoga and i think that sense of spiritual connection to something that was greater than myself really helped i think it helped with my emotions and helped just feel like there was some hope and there was there was some kind of broader picture than i was able to see right now you

SPEAKER_01: made a lot of changes a lot of big changes like in your lifestyle and your diet and i think a lot of us do that or asked to do that right off the start i'm just curious how you found that you know when i first got my diagnosis i was told you know more sugar gluten nor alcohol no more i mean i was drinking at the time but sugar and the gluten were still very much in my life and i had a raging sugar addiction and then i was just sent home and just like make all these changes live off of ko and it was really tough for me and then a lot of self you know because i was sticking to this plan all the time it was supposed to help so what was the process like for you making all of these changes oh my

SPEAKER_00: gosh i can relate to all of that you know it was like not only are you totally miserable but we're going to take away anything you enjoy eating which is like one of the few kind of pleasures left so i was also on you know the gluten free dairy free sugar free i also i couldn't drink any caffeine or alcohol if i would just have a sip i would be shot for days even more so

SPEAKER_00: i was on the elimination diet so there was just basically i was eating like protein usually either chicken or fish and cooked vegetables because i would get really bloated if i would have salad so yeah it was it was kind of miserable i mean it just sort of felt like this deprivation and i think too in looking back there was a part of me that really resented it because i didn't feel like i was an active participant at that point in my own healing you know really felt like i went to sort of more natural pathogen doctors because i thought there is going to be more inclusionary but in a lot of ways it was still like ok there take this medication take this supplement take this herb do this diet and i just sort of felt like it was being done to me and actually i did have a really perceptive doctor years later i saw for the c f s and although he didn't really help me with the symptoms he helped me emotionally because actually he said you know what i think you think i'm going to tell you to take a bunch more supplements and more restrictive diets and i suspect that's actually perpetuating the trauma in which you felt you were in control of your body and now you're just being told what to do with your body by all these medical professionals and rayland i just started crying i was like someone sees me and i didn't even know that's how i felt but i think for those of us even if there isn't a trauma what i find with other people i meet who have c f s is often if not always there's a lot of stress beforehand and there can be a sense then whether it was existent before or certainly after the diagnosis of just being so powerless and so i started realizing with diet and everything else at some point i have to regain my agency and my power and my collaboration in my healing because otherwise i was resenting it and i and i just i think those diets didn't work partly because of that and partly because the root cause of my c f s was not that i wasn't eating enough kale right that wasn't the cause or that i wasn't taking thirty supplements a day

SPEAKER_01: such a good point one of the things that i just love about these interviews is that i learned something about my own journey and i get more insight every single person i talk to hadn't really thought about you know and i make when i made the switch later on in my journey to plant based it was so easy i did it effortlessly but it was my choice and i had just it was my idea and i believed in it so in the beginning when those were imposed on me it was really challenging and i found even though i was thought i was committed i was forever trying to find work around like ok i can't have gluten i can't have sugar i really want some chicken fingers so i took some chicken and cornflakes and i deep fry them and then i think the sauce made out of like stevia

SPEAKER_01: or you know like not healthy food at all but there was no sugar

SPEAKER_01: right make all these desserts that were like raisins and somehow maple syrup and like why didn't sugar in there so i like diet sodas like diet orange soda so i get

SPEAKER_01: myself up in the beginning with so much crap trying to like find me like ok

SPEAKER_00: absolutely and especially i remember watching a video where you were talking about you know for me i just feel better on plant based diets and that's what i found too and so i think especially if you're being asked to eat in a way that just doesn't feel right to your body for whatever reason not that there is one right or wrong diet but for you there's going to be resentment you're right you're going to try to find ways around it that are necessarily nutritional

SPEAKER_01: so what happened what

SPEAKER_00: so let's see i think that you know this whole thirteen year saga had different phases and and i would say the first five years i was really impaired meaning i couldn't do much out of the house i mean i could still take care of myself which was really nice but my parents would bring groceries and things

SPEAKER_00: then i would say like the next maybe five or six years i had a little more ability and mobility and i could do things like i could go to a local yoga studio and i would notice when i would do things that i would enjoy especially that was really calming and soothing i would get a little more energy so i mean i was doing like a lot of restorative yoga but still i was getting out i could see friends a little bit more but like not in the evenings if i saw a friend in the evening i have insomnia i wouldn't sleep all night

SPEAKER_00: so but what i really noticed over time was kind of back to this point of personal agency and starting to like tune into really what works for me was i noticed when i would be in nature which i really loved when i would read poetry or i love listening to eckhart tolle i actually couldn't read a lot that was the thing because of the brain fog i could only really read people like eckhart tolle because he writes a few words and it means so much or i could read poetry because it was just a few words right but i started really getting into that i started writing poetry i started actually just more doing what gave me a little bit of peace or relief rather than just trying to fix myself and get rid of the symptoms wasn't that i totally gave up on it but i would say i mean this took well over a decade to kind of like get off the roller coaster because i just noticed again and again i was so exasperated by trying every last diet every supplement every i mean i one point i was doing like enemas every single night all these rituals deep detoxes ten days worth and i was just like none of these things have worked and so i just kind of started tuning into my own self and my own body and then i had this one experience which actually ended up being a blessing where i thought oh i'll try one more healer so this woman was supposedly a shamanic healer she was like a white woman in san diego who had done a little bit of training in the amazon and so she i went in for a session with her and she was kind of smoking her pipe and she asked me about the trauma and i actually started opening up for some reason and really crying and she changed the subject and said you know i don't think we should talk about this let's talk about my cat which i'm dressing up for halloween and so i think somehow she got triggered or something but i felt so shut down and so numb after that and i wrote her out a two hundred dollars check i left there numb and i was just like i am never going to give away my power to someone else like here i'm thinking this woman who's not even listening to me who's shutting me down is going to heal me and it's just not going to happen not to say i didn't think i needed help from people or that we don't need support but it shifted kind of the power dynamic because the situation with her was so ridiculous you know that i was paying her two hundred dollars to tell me about her cat costume now about twelve years in something happened i was actually meditating a lot i got me into transcendental meditation and kind of the inner teachings of yoga which really teach us that everything on the outside including our health comes from our internal state at least there's some origin with you know our minds and so i was just fascinated with all these philosophies and studies practices and it lit me up and i felt like i got to this point where some kind of surrender happened and i know that sounds really cliche but it's hard to describe i fell into this state of peace there was actually mental peace even though i still had the same symptoms and i kind of was almost observing myself there would be intense flu like you know aching but i felt it in my body but i was kind of watching it and there was this internal state of nonresistance or peace and it really wasn't something i tried to do although i had been studying about it but it kind of happened and interestingly that went on for a year i mean so it didn't actually shift the physical symptoms but i sort of was it's not like i wanted them to be there i mean this was this whole situation sucked it was treacherous it was a grueling but at that point somehow i wasn't fighting it and so i feel like from that place i really wasn't pursuing medical interventions i was eating what i wanted which which is like mostly plant based organic whole foods i just like that you know it felt good to my body it was kind of like intuition nutrition i would i couldn't work i was on disability and there was that bothered me i mean i wanted a purpose i wanted to contribute but i just kind of accepted this is where i am right now and so from that place interestingly as i started just like pursuing what i enjoyed i took this online writing class called right into light and i met this woman and she said oh i recovered from c f s through this type of mind body work if you want we can set up a phone conversation and i also got migraine so i was like well i can only talk on the phone for ten minutes but yeah i would love to do that

SPEAKER_00: so we set up this conversation we start talking and she starts telling me all her symptoms were exactly the same you know and she had epstein bar and she had all these things and that she made this total recovery well i told her i could talk for ten minutes three hours later i actually got up and ran around the block like i had not ran in thirteen years i had something of like a mini spontaneous remission now this was not the end of the story you know symptoms did come back so i don't want people to think oh that doesn't happen to me it can't happen but what that conversation showed me was that i could recover and what really changed for me was she explained that all these years doctors had been saying these viruses were suppressing my immune system so it was like the epstein bar and ten other viruses that i just couldn't overcome and so to me i felt like that's this insurmountable physical thing but she explained she had all those diagnoses she had all those viral titers and what happened was she learned that it was more how her brain and nervous system were processing stress and just stuck in this hyper vigilant mode and essentially her brain had learned these patterns these neuropathways and she recovered and at the end of this conversation now you would think this would be infuriating but by this point i was so with her she said rebecca you're not sick you know and i think she kind of alluded you're just you're stressed you've been through trauma your system stuck in this pattern but you can get out of it and i believed it i believed it one hundred percent like i felt it in all of me and my body reacted with that that burst of energy at least in that moment

SPEAKER_01: wow so in that conversation it wasn't even as if you were doing some sort of you know therapy or work on yourself it was just this breakthrough of understanding of what was happening and it gave you this break from symptoms at least for a little bit exactly

SPEAKER_00: exactly and that's a really good point because i think for me what the key was even though this woman wasn't a therapist she wasn't a doctor she and i had been a science journalist so i love science and she kind of explained the science of what can happen in our brain and nervous system with chronic fatigue chronic pain brain fog with all these symptoms and it made sense to me and so i felt like she was literally rediagnosing me which is crazy because she's not a medical professional but i felt like i can overcome this because it's now a matter of understanding this knowledge learning how i can calm down my nervous system start feeling my emotions start challenging myself more like getting back to more activities to sort of retrain my brain and it was kind of like to me and i'm not saying this is for everybody but for me i felt like i finally heard the truth like this resonated with me with what was happening and it gave me hope that i could recover instead of just being like viruses or faulty genes or mitochondria or things i couldn't do anything about

SPEAKER_00: and after i had that little spontaneous remission i ran around the block multiple times i knew i was on the right path i knew beyond a shadow of a doubt and that's all it was was knowledge i mean it was just information which is really crazy and i think it was her caring like she cared a lot to help me she spent three hours on the phone with me

SPEAKER_01: absolutely incredible and it just it makes me question so many things about my own experience in my own story and you're talking about food and for years i couldn't eat rice it made me incredibly sick it was one of my food intolerances and even after i recovered i still have some rice feel sick i was terrified of rice and i lived in asia for eight and a half years so that was a challenging situation but just recently i just started trying having little tiny bits like oh i feel okay let's try to have a little bit more oh i feel okay and now i can eat copious amounts and i'm fine and i just assumed okay my body must have healed it but now i'm thinking you know it might have just been a brain association all those years that i had built up triggering that response and then as i built that confidence with like a little bit i'm ok a little bit i'm okay brought up and socialized not to attribute attribute our physical symptoms to something that's being caused by the brain like we don't even see the connection at all like there's a wall here where this stuff starts where this stuff starts and it's just exactly to see that that's

SPEAKER_00: not the case so fascinating well exactly and you know what's so interesting we're raised like you say to see like a physical symptom has to have a physical cause but now there's actually a whole body of neuroscience and scientific research showing that there's just two studies out this year one out of harvard and one out of boulder but the basically shows chronic pain is caused and cured by a form of brain retraining by this specific approach because the brain generates pain and it generates pain as well as fatigue because it senses danger but that danger can be psychological as well as physical it's the same part of the brain that perceives it and so what's so ironic is that the doctor i ended up studying with to train in this howard schubiner who i highly recommend his book called unlearn your pain and he talks about fatigue he talks about these food sensitivities as well and he really helped me see it's like not necessarily that some food is bad for us or some behavior is that our brain perceives it so if you eat a poisonous berry the next time you see that berry you'll get queasy because your brain via your body is trained to protect you but you might see another berry like a blueberry and you could get queasy because that part of the brain the emotional limbic centers aren't like particularly discriminating they're just sort of picking up information in our environment and if we're stressed or in our nervous system hypervigilant they can mistake that like rice isn't good for me or whatever we're told by our doctors isn't good but this dr schupner actually led me to believe and it became true that i could eat all these foods it's just that my brain had become so scared of them so of course this is not true with an actual like food allergy like peanuts and things i mean that really does exist but with the sensitivities to food i know it kind of blows your mind and i'm not trying to say that people should just start eating all these things i mean you have to decide for yourself but what you're describing to me is interesting that it sounds very similar when you can kind of retrain yourself that you know it wasn't an innate food allergy it's an association or a condition response it's like pavlov's dog right it's the same dynamic

SPEAKER_01: yeah and i think thank you for taking the time to explain all that because i think that's an important distinction because i think a lot of us myself included sometimes get a bit put back or like are you saying just imagining this whole thing and it's not that it doesn't exist you know our brain is a very real part of our body it's another organ that we have so it is creating conditions in our body it is something that is real it's just not maybe caused by the organ that we think is causing it it's originating from a different place in the body

SPEAKER_00: yeah i'm so glad you said that because i know like all of us who have dealt with cfs we've been told like you're making this up or we've been doubted so i so get that people are sensitive to this and these symptoms are a hundred percent real and the people who i've mentioned dr sarno and dr schubiner whose work really helped me they're very clear this is a hundred percent real but like you said the brain is like the master control so like we know the brain and the nervous system are constantly scanning for danger and if they sense it they'll go into flight fight or freeze mode to protect you so either to help you to run or fight and you're flooded with stress hormones or to shut you down if the danger seems too big i think with cfs the danger seems too big a lot of times and we become frozen and our brain and nervous system is trying to help us it's creating real physical symptoms they could not be more real

SPEAKER_00: but in my case at least i came to believe that the things i was told were causing the symptoms were more like effects like the epstein bar i'm sure was higher because my brain and nervous system weren't functioning optimally and so when you're prepared to run or fight your digestion is not a priority your hormones aren't a priority all these other things are not working as well that's true the immune system isn't a priority but what i found for me is that wasn't the answer because that was the effect not the cause and the cause was like going to the brain but also like not to say this is caused by emotions because i know that can put people off and they can think oh i'm being told i'm just emotional or depressed it's not that at all but one thing i really feel is missing in the medical system is acknowledging we are living breathing feeling human beings and back to when darwin wrote about the evolutionary value of emotions emotions are actually what tells our brain and nervous system whether we're safe or not safe whether to trigger the flight fight freeze response right if there's fear that response the nerve firing patterns change

SPEAKER_00: the hormones change to help us so emotions are the cue so to act like i just felt like doctors didn't ever ask once was there anything stressful possibly happening in your life before you went from being this active tv news reporter to being homebound no one asked that and it's like where's the heart and the humanity much less the neuroscience and i don't mean to blame or implicate i know everybody's doing their best but i think we need like more trauma informed care and even more understanding that the brain and the nervous system do react from fear in perpetuating symptoms

SPEAKER_01: i find it really interesting you talked about the pain because there's so many people who are living with chronic pain and unfortunately with my experience i had some but it wasn't serious and i just i don't know how people function with that level of chronic pain in their life and then recently i reviewed the curable app because people kept telling me about it and through that process just learning about the app how it works reading reviews reaching out to people the mecfs community asking about their experience with it and a lot of people are having significant success or completely having their pain gone because of using this and it is coming from the premise that the chronic pain is originating in the brain so is that all part of like the process of your recovery is there something similar

SPEAKER_00: such a great question i'm really glad to see curable and other things like that are kind of gaining more acceptance curable is based on this exact same approach so one of the doctors i mentioned howard schubiner is on the board of curable john sarno has passed away but he was kind of considered the early pioneer in this so curable is based on this and i actually discovered not the curable app but john sarno's work in this this whole mind body approach much earlier in my cfs journey but i discovered sarno's book healing back pain which by the way back pain neck pain all these chronic pains are also usually caused by the brain and nervous system rather than a structural issue but i couldn't see how to apply that to myself it was like but i have exhaustion i have brain fog i have all these other things and i think when i met that woman i'm ever grateful for kathy and she explained she used a very similar approach as curable and she just sort of used fatigue as a synonym and later i reached out to howard schubiner and

SPEAKER_00: did a training with him and i asked him and he said it's the same thing because if you think of fatigue there's a part of you that doesn't feel safe and it's sort of like your system's trying to like shut you down and like keep you at home and it did feel like that for me like i think there was a perception this is subconscious by the way because ninety percent of our brain and emotions including our emotions are subconscious so we're not aware of them but i think that for me there was this perception like the world's not safe anymore after that assault and it was sort of like my system trying to keep me at home now it is a bit of a painful way to try to protect you but you know this we're dealing with also kind of some reptilian parts of the brain fear based parts of the brain but anyway to go to your point i haven't done the curable app because i already recovered through some of the other books and through coaching but it's it's really the same approach and people can apply it to brain fog and digestive issues and fatigue as well so

SPEAKER_01: my body approach what would one day one week in your life look like

SPEAKER_00: so do you mean like more when i was recovering or just today yet more when i was recovering ok so yeah both because i still i still integrate it but i would say when i was still over that first year i was every day doing these meditations called somatic tracking so i'm really glad curable i'm told by some of my clients now has somatic tracking meditations on there but basically you don't even need a meditation but it's helpful to be guided where you're just kind of tracking sensations in your body so it's like the fatigue might end up feeling like you know heaviness through your whole body or say i would have a lot of burning in my arm so i would bring my mind into that but you're getting these messages of safety like i'm safe and ok there's actually nothing wrong with my body so you're kind of retraining your brain and i would do that every day i would actually do it every night as well and i feel like it broke the insomnia habit and i say habit because that's also kind of a subconscious learned behavior that the bed becomes associated with anxiety so i would do the somatic tracking usually a few different meditations every day i would i just love reading the books there's different podcasts on this approach curable has one there's others that i really like called tell me about your pain is one of them so i was learning about it and then i would like go and start to do things i was like oh i'm going to go try to walk a half a mile or a mile or something at this point i would just walk a little more and i would notice the symptoms so as i'm doing it the symptoms are rising i'm getting that malaise and i would just be like reiterate like you know i'm ok i got this i i know what's going on and that's like how you retrain your brain that you can do these things which i think a lot of people do anyway through graded exposure you know honestly it doesn't take a lot of time this approach it's kind of just learning it doing the meditations i would see this coach once a week in the beginning then every other week and just started really adding on activities to my life including food i started eating more things that i wanted and at first like you do have a reaction because your brain thinks that's not good for you but then within usually a few times i could just eat it ok it's crazy i know it does sort of seem wild and i think that there has to be a certain pacing and timing with this because i'll say i was really ready i would have been able to just jump into this years before when for one i didn't really believe it and i was bed bound so i mean just to have like compassion for people i think that was another thing i really brought in raylan and again it's not that it took time but i started bringing in self compassion when i would get symptoms i would just ask how am i feeling emotionally because with this work you want to bring it back to the emotions because we so focus on the physical symptoms but you really want to tend to the emotions which are driving the state of the nervous system so it's like how am i feeling emotionally and i would acknowledge i'm scared i'm really scared i'm really frustrated and then i would just kind of be compassionate with myself and i still am to this day like that's really hard you know just talk to myself i'm so sorry what do you what do you want or need right now instead of just pushing myself i would challenge myself but if i needed to back down i would and sometimes take a break and just kind of tune into like what do you want or need it just has gotten to be and now over it's been a few years a much more kind of personal attentive way of dealing with yourself i mean it sounds funny to be talking to yourself but i think we all do anyway so it's just doing it in a much more compassionate way where i used to beat myself up like you had said for not recovering i was like i'm failing what's wrong with me you know and i mean that dr schumer and others will explain that self criticism actually does activate the danger alarm signal in the brain and the nervous system so it actually can feed into symptoms

SPEAKER_00: and so yeah just being a lot more like compassionate with myself like this is really hard but we can do hard things and we'll pick it back up when when it's time

SPEAKER_01: and i know you and i have talked about before

SPEAKER_01: personality traits but some people at least

SPEAKER_01: is kind of illnesses people who drive themselves hard people who are critical of themselves so do you think that plays a role in symptom perpetuation or impacts recovery in some way

SPEAKER_00: you know when people read john sarno's books and there's one called the mind body prescription and he describes the personality type of people who get chronic symptoms and he does talk about c f s but he also talks about chronic pain and other symptoms that he believes had an origin in the brain and nervous system and he describes like perfectionist check right people pleasers check maybe you're doing things for other people instead of for yourself people who are like really conscientious hard driving

SPEAKER_00: put a lot of pressure on themselves to do things well and i just felt like i was seeing myself in those pages and as i meet people with c f s and you meet so many people

SPEAKER_00: i do see that pattern a lot like we're and also and not just that with myself with a lot of people i meet it's like not only are we putting all this pressure and stress and even sometimes criticism on ourselves but we're holding the emotions it so it becomes kind of like a pressure cooker right like if you have a water that's boiling with the lid on eventually it's going to burst because we're holding in all the pressures i remember i know i keep bringing him up but he's such a kind man and i think he's really very forward looking but dr schubiner in a training was saying people who get c f s and these chronic symptoms they're really nice people like i get to work with the nicest people right because it's not people who take out their stuff on other people but the flip side of that is like kind of holding in the emotions

SPEAKER_00: part of that too i'll throw in i did some journaling like expressive writing to kind of like really just get out all the frustration i didn't mention that earlier in my practices but just to kind of like let myself really journal and write about anything that i'm too nice to say to anyone

SPEAKER_00: that that was actually that was helpful and then yeah back to your point the personality traits i think just learning that you know we all kind of learn this with with any c f s like we can't be perfectionists right like some of us i mean i was lucky if i could just take a shower some days so it kind of softened and that was that was a good thing but then when i recovered and went back to work i did see some of those tendencies come back and i do actively work with it where i'll notice if i'm pushing too hard like if i'm feeling stressed or pressure like i got to gotta got to get these things done i can start getting a little fatigue and i can also start getting i recovered from interstitial cystitis through the same work the bladder pain i can get like little hints of it but i'm always able to link it to like emotional stress either that happened to me or that i put myself under

SPEAKER_00: and once i'm aware of it usually the symptoms subside or sometimes i'll do like the somatic tracking meditation i mentioned to you or something like that but i think i softened you know i still i still have some of that you know i don't think we have to like totally change who we are to get well again but i found it was a wake up call to be more kind to myself and more authentic in who i always was where i think in many ways before i liked my life as a t v news reporter but in a lot of ways it wasn't really me i mean i do tend to like a quieter more introspective life i like to do more writing and i think a lot of times it's like more finding who you really are and who you really are in treating yourself like you would treat a good friend i think these things can actually help more than we know and they have helped me a lot and i feel with a lot of people that it can really help them to make those connections like this isn't just unkind to myself like it's actually affecting my health

SPEAKER_01: and light bulb moment for me when you're talking like oh my goodness the anger and how we are kind of really nice people really like her community

SPEAKER_00: right we're so nice which made

SPEAKER_00: you know a joy

SPEAKER_00: but you know who else has helped me more recently is kristen neff's work on self compassion because a lot of times when we are like hard driving we just take it out on ourself but to realize like this is really really hard like to have compassionate compassion on ourself is also really helpful and can soften the blow

SPEAKER_00: all these losses yeah i

SPEAKER_01: think that compassion piece is massive and also that release i remember i was interviewing daniel on this channel and he's just incredible and i learned so much from him as well but he talked about how important it is to journal your anger and i thought i'm not angry i don't have to try it so i added it to my morning journaling practice my angry but i was angry about a lot

SPEAKER_01: of just i thought he was crazy so it is a little bit of that bottling and you know i was and i was born and raised in canada we're very strongly socialized to be polite and keep

SPEAKER_01: waves and so yeah it's just so much happening with the emotions and our personalities and how we treat ourselves how we interact with other people it's just really really important things

SPEAKER_01: incredible and get up here on the screen somewhere if you want to check it out i was giving it a watch because he's just

SPEAKER_01: when you when you had this realization of what your path was going to be and you started doing all this work how long did it take you from you first started when you got to a place where you felt pretty much functionally recovered

SPEAKER_00: i would say that i had that first boost which was amazing for a few days to actually like and i had been going through a really symptomatic period where i was kind of back in bed a lot of the time it was in the early winter of two thousand and eighteen and to go from that to running around the block and actually feeling pretty good was stark but then i would say it took about probably eight or nine months till i felt like i'm really recovered and even probably a year before i was adding a lot more things like back to some international travel so in the mind body way of thinking and this learned associations we're talking about because i had had these traumas happen overseas so i had the assault i had that airplane trip i told you about so when i would try to go near an airplane i mean my brain i would get so many symptoms but i started connecting this is just like a perceived danger even though i'm going to a different place so it took maybe a year to kind of get back to some more travel and being really active of course that was before the pandemic i'm not doing a lot of traveling but yeah and honestly i still incorporate this in my daily life you know i still love kind of doing a somatic meditation throughout the day if i notice myself getting stressed or pressuring myself or maybe just not feeling quite tipped top i just sort of check in what's going on emotionally notice what my thoughts are it just becomes a way of life but i think yeah it's been wow three years now feel really grateful i'm at this point where i know there's so many years where it's i would never want to go through it again honestly and i wouldn't want anyone to have to it's so hard but i am at this point where it's like i'm grateful for the ways i've grown that i don't know if i would have otherwise you know i might still be pushing myself and beating myself up and trying to really find my own sense of self esteem through my career which i largely realized i was doing to try to feel better about myself but now it comes more from inside you know there's just more acceptance and things so i think these all can be gifts like whatever your path is you know we all kind of learn these lessons and i know it's at some point that's really annoying to hear but right and i get that but i do feel yeah i live a lot more balanced peaceful life than i used to for sure

SPEAKER_01: is a massive gift at this experience or it can be every single person i talk to every single person i've interviewed recovered something similar they're just a better place than they were before and they've learned so much such a weird thing like i used to my own journey i'm like do i have

SPEAKER_01: a little bit myself even just thinking about being grateful for that hell what i take it away if i had choice and it's just such a crazy thing to think i don't think i would just mind blowing and i'm sure if someone had said that to me when i was really in the thick of it i would want to punch them in the face but i would just

SPEAKER_00: hold it exactly but you know to me that's like a really form of going to the acceptance and healing to get to that point where it's like how i would take it away i'm grateful for what i've learned and just to kind of share that that a lot of lessons come i mean i see it as sort of like for me and i see this with a lot of people to some degree some of the things that led or fed into the symptoms not to say it was our fault there's a lot of things we don't understand about this disease but some of the things that fed into it we have the chance to kind of rebalance in ourselves and then they make the quality of life a lot better like turning self criticism into self compassion learning to take more personal empowerment in my case instead of just thinking that doctors or someone else is going to fix me or heal me and granted it wasn't their fault because i was also kind of giving them that power but realize like wow there's so much resilience inside and for me i've learned nothing's going to work unless i intuitively feel right about it like if i'm doing something as a means to an end whether it's about my health or anything else it never goes well it just never does so like retapping into that intuition has been a big one to what

SPEAKER_01: did it feel like for you after so many years being unwell to relatively quickly recover after twelve or more years

SPEAKER_00: i remember feeling every day waking up like a kid like oh my gosh i have energy i can go take a walk i can at that point it wasn't necessarily back to running but i can go explore the world anything i could do just felt like it was brand new like i was learning it for the first time i remember i went to a zoom class and this would have been some months in to the recovery but the teacher i mean i'm not like the most you know coordinated dancer but i do love to dance and i felt like everybody else there was like following in steps i never taken zoom but that was this craze that happened when i had c f s so i was like completely like the class is going one way i was going the other way i was so happy i was overjoyed and there must have been like eighty people in the class at the end of it the teacher came up and she's like i have never seen someone so happy in this dance class like regular zumba people so it was like i was so happy that i could dance so it is it is amazing i would kind of question it sometime and i would be like but i would have symptoms that would come up i'd have flare ups a lot so i was kind of reminded like ok when i would kind of question like is this real you know it was like it is real but it yeah it's a quality stabilize i think now things for me like maybe there's a little less of being able to do things but there's definitely more appreciation kind of more of like a stable appreciation every day for just simple things that aren't that simple when you have me right taking a walk meeting a friend being able to work big one or just do what you really want to do

SPEAKER_01: i notice it a lot when i just have a really busy day and i go through this crazy day or maybe a really busy week and i mean i get a bit tired i'm still human push yourself so far

SPEAKER_01: look what i can do this is incredible and i still have these moments even though like you it's not you know the little things you start used to it but i still

SPEAKER_01: mirror because it took me a while to fully trust it it was like a tentative like here

SPEAKER_01: might hear me gloating and it might come back it's a good it's an amazing place to finally be and i only recently just got to this place where i feel comfortable and like ok it's fully behind me it's really amazing because i know for so many of us for all those years if you like you're never going to get there we did it yeah

SPEAKER_00: yeah i mean recovering from c f s is the hardest thing i've ever done by far it really is amazing sometimes you kind of question it but i think that's a good thing because it makes you appreciate it right and i saw your video recently talking about i know this is behind me and it actually gave me more confidence i was like wow she's got like such certainty that's that's amazing because i think i do sometimes still question it a little bit

SPEAKER_00: but it's all kind of in stages right yeah it's all stages and then you get to the point where you feel it's behind you and you've recovered but yet you have all these things you've learned and that you still integrate

SPEAKER_01: it's a good place to be and that's why i just did that video because i didn't do it until now because it was the first time realizing

SPEAKER_01: trusting this is behind me it's interesting

SPEAKER_01: like so many of us this whole experience shapes your focus for your career your passions so porter

SPEAKER_00: right no i'm not i for so many years all i wanted to do was get well and go back to being a news reporter because i really did enjoy that i knew i wanted that profession from the time i was in sixth grade you know i wrote my career report wanted to be a journalist but i changed so much along the way when i did finally recover there was just nothing in me that really wanted to go back to that i thought about it but also this the nature of news had changed it's so two hundred and forty seven now and it's a little bit insane and also i think what i was so incredibly struck by how many practitioners i went to fifty doctors and healers over the course of thirteen years i spent hundreds of thousands of dollars and the thing that helped me was this woman speaking to me like really caring about me listening to my story asking what had happened what stressors happened kind of explaining the science and i covered through that and so i just was led to train in that field even though i had recovered myself i did a number of trainings in my body training nervous system life coaching and things over a couple years and then i really call myself a mind body coach so i work with people really with all kinds of diagnosis that are generated by the brain and nervous system a lot of people with any c f s come to me but it's also people with chronic fatigue chronic headaches

SPEAKER_00: back pain things like that and i should say not everything is generated by the mind and body i mean there are tumors there are fractures there are infections there are things that actually have a pathological cause that can be treated and should be treated right it's just when there's things that don't seem to have a clear cause or a clear cure that we kind of look more to this connection so yes i work with people one on one and i teach group classes because it is it is a different paradigm so i feel like

SPEAKER_00: people can can learn about this approach in a really inexpensive way they can get some of the books or listen to the podcast but it is sort of important to see if it resonates or not because part of what the healing is as you heard with my light bulb moment is actually really getting it that like the cause of these symptoms and that alone can turn down the fear of the in the danger signal in the brain which calms the nervous system which calms the symptoms so because of that i started teaching classes because i saw it was really important for people to kind of have knowledge and different meditations and it's been really fun to be kind of in community with people so that's what i do now full time and i write about this quite a bit and use my journalism or writing about my body healing i blog and that kind of thing and it really does feel like my calling you know it feels like something i would just do for free because i want to do it but it has i got to this point where it's like ok either need to get another job because i'm off disability or really make this my vocation i just decided i wanted to do this full time so it's been interesting growing my own business but it's really it's from my heart and i really love it it's amazing to see people not just recover but like learn and heal and grow as people

SPEAKER_01: i think that's just incredible i don't have to tell you or anybody watching that there is such

SPEAKER_01: out there i think that's why so many of us are silver lining or you know another gift of this whole thing we come through it and then be compassionate about wanting to connect with the other people who are facing similar things because we see this massive gap in the medical system with millions of people in it that are just lost and alone and trying to figure this out and not getting

SPEAKER_01: many of them any kind of hopeful support so on your website on like it's just

SPEAKER_01: pulling each other out of this together which i think is a really incredible thing so i'm just so grateful for you and the work that you do and that you're out there providing this kind of support

SPEAKER_00: thank you rayland i'm so grateful to you honestly i'm so touched by looking at how much you give out how much you put out to do this just to support the community it's clear that your heart is so in it and you just really want to help people and i know that you're a lifeline for a lot of people so thank you

SPEAKER_01: it's really heartbreaking thing to see how many people are still suffering specially when you know that suffering so intimately so yeah you know i used to think when i first started doing this channel people would say reach out to me and beautiful messages because of you because of your channel and the people on your channel i have hope like

SPEAKER_01: this is worth it just for that just for that and the more time people reaching out to me because of the people on your channel i found a way to recover and fully recovered again and it's just this is just

SPEAKER_01: the most selfish thing i've ever done because i get so much out of it it's really rewarding so it's a good motivator to keep out of really incredible thing to be able to connect with people in this way even if you can help the teeniest tiniest little bit it's really amazing so if people want to learn more about the work that you do or follow you in social spaces how can they do that

SPEAKER_00: the best way is probably through my website which is just rebeccatolan com because i have some like free somatic meditations on there if you want to try it out i have a blog i have loads of just free there's a resource page and a media page and a lot of it is sort of geared to how you can use the approach you would find in the curable app but for fatigue because a lot of people that try that approach are like they're not talking about chronic fatigue much less mecfs which we know is not just fatigue so that's really the best way i'm also on facebook but i'm just not a huge social media person so probably the website and

SPEAKER_01: of course all of this will be available in the video description so for people watching just expand that and you'll find all of that there i highly encourage you to check it out and rebecca you've mentioned a lot of really great resources and books and so forth so we'll make sure to have a full list of all of those things linked below as well so if you're interested in learning more about any of these doctors or these books that rebecca has referenced that will be there and if you joined this video i've got a whole playlist of full recovery stories just like this one i'll link it up here it's just really moving really inspiring stuff and i learned something from every single one so i think yeah i'm just so grateful to people like yourself i'm grateful to you rebecca for doing this thank you so much for doing this today

SPEAKER_00: oh it's so my pleasure likewise ray lynn thank you

SPEAKER_01: and thank you to all of you who are watching i cannot believe the love and the support you guys throw my way with everything you're going through it's just it's so moving so i'm just trying to throw that all right back at you and give you some stuff that hopefully is helpful so looking forward to your thoughts and your comments in the video description let's keep the conversation going rebecca and i will answer your questions there as well so thank you again rebecca thank you everyone who is watching whatever you're facing keep going hang in there you have totally got this things can and will change and good for you for watching videos like this and all the way to the end

SPEAKER_01: throw a thumbs up in the in the comments if you made it to the end because you're a superstar

SPEAKER_01: that's it for today thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next video
