Do You Want to Heal From Rheumatoid Arthritis?

If you do want to heal from rheumatoid arthritis, I am writing this blog for you. Yes, you!  In fact, Jane Hogan Health is all for you too!

I was once where you are. I know the excruciating pain, the sleepless nights, the frustration at increasing disability, the anger at having your future dreams taken away from you.  I know how it feels when no one else understands that while you may look ok, you are anything but ok. I know how it feels when you are told there is no cure, that you can expect to get progressively disabled, and the only tools to manage symptoms are harsh drugs with horrible side effects.  I know how it feels to see the pictures of the deformed hands and feet and look at your own and wonder how long it will take for yours to get like that.  I too have felt the pain and the despair. 

Feeling like a victim of this disease and is not a good feeling. I just didn't want to feel like a victim. I wanted to be strong like I had been. I wanted to look forward to the future where I could do anything I wanted and not be limited physically.  Knowing that feeling like a victim doesn’t feel good, I wanted to move away from that feeling. 

In the field of personal development, one of the key principles is taking responsibility for your life.  Although it may sound like taking responsibility for your life means taking responsibility for having your illness, I see it in a different way.  What it actually means is taking responsibility for how you respond to your illness. 

Responsibility: response and ability.  Response-ability

That means you have the ability to respond your illness, or anything that happens in your life. There's a lot of power actually in how we respond things, because how we respond is within our own control, not outside of us.  No one but ourselves can determine how we respond to any circumstance. 

So how do you want to respond to your illness? We know that it does not feel good to be the victim.  While it’s unlikely that anybody choosing to be a victim consciously, it's a natural response when we're told that there Is no cure for our illness and that it’s in our genes.  

Could we choose a different response?

Somewhere along my journey, I think it came from the work of Byron Katie, I read a statement that was a real eye-opener for me.  It is a simple matter of perspective, or reframing a negative circumstance.  The statement is:

 “What if this is all happening FOR me?”   

That blew my mind! Happening for me? How crazy is that?  How could a debilitating illness be happening FOR me?  Or for you?

When it comes down to it, your only real wealth is your health. If you don't have good health it really doesn't matter how much money you have, how big your house is, or how famous you are.  So when you lose your good health, when you get an illness like rheumatoid arthritis or any other illness, your life becomes very focused.  Nothing is more important than regaining your health because without that, all the other good things in life aren’t available to you in the same way.

Could your illness be telling you to focus on what is important, I mean really important, in your life? 

What if, instead of looking at the illness as happening to you and taking away from your life, you considered the possibility that your illness is here to help you identify what is important and where you need to focus? Maybe your illness is giving you a clear compass on which direction to take in all areas of your life.

If you use your illness as your compass it makes decisions a lot easier. This compass also tells you naturally to go in the direction that feels good. 

What felt good for me was anything that reduces pain. What felt good for me was believing that I could cure myself from this disease. What felt good for me was reading about people who had healed rheumatoid arthritis naturally. What felt good for me was visualizing the future where I was healthy and strong again. These good feelings are what guided me through the lifestyle changes that weren't easy to make.  

Lifestyle changes for me meant changing the food I ate,  prioritizing sleep in order to heal, and removing stress in my life. It meant I had to make the time every day to do stress reduction and self-care practices like movement and meditation and relaxation. None of these changes were easy to make because this way of living was so different from how I had been living and how my close friends were living.  I  really had to make a lot of adjustments but my healing vision helped to motivate me.  Less pain and continual improvement helped motivate me.  I just kept steering my compass in the direction that felt good.  And I got stronger. 

Back to you, and why I am writing this blog.  If you are tired of being a victim, tired of feeling afraid of the future and tired of the pain of rheumatoid arthritis (or another autoimmune disease), then follow along my blog and my journey with me.  

I can't promise that your rheumatoid arthritis will go into remission but I know that I can give you tools and information to help guide you on the right path.  You will move into a position of power, rather than a victim. You can become the CEO and director of your health and your life. 

And that feels so much better!

So, you can read the blog posts here for information on how to move along on your healing journey.  If you want to move faster, you could choose to work with me one-on-one as your health coach, where we will co-create a plan and I can shine the light for you along the way.  

Whatever you choose, I am excited for you as you embark on this journey!