In this episode of Coming Home to Ourselves, Denise Elysa sits down with naturopathic doctor Lisa Ghent, ND, founder of Collaborative Wellness in Ladner, BC. Dr. Lisa has built her practice around what she calls sorting through complex cases, people who have seen countless specialists and still don’t have a clear picture of what’s happening in their bodies. It’s a …
What Intuitive Eating Principles Look Like When You Live with Chronic Illness
There is a version of the intuitive eating conversation that gets shared in wellness spaces fairly often. Eat when you’re hungry. Stop when you’re full. Make peace with food. It sounds straightforward enough, and for people who are starting from a relatively uncomplicated relationship with eating, those ideas can be a relief from the overwhelming and often contradicting nature of …
Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn: Understanding Your Nervous System’s Survival Responses
Fight, Flight, Freeze, and Fawn. These four terms have become part of the mainstream conversation around mental health and healing over the last decade or so, often travelling under the label “trauma responses.” Before going further, I want to pause on that framing. A trauma response is what happens when something in the present triggers a past trauma, activating a …
What Is ME/CFS? Myalgic Encephalomyelitis Symptoms, Causes, and What Somatic Support Can Offer
If you have been living with ME/CFS, or are beginning to wonder whether what you’re experiencing has a name, there is a good chance you’ve already spent more time than anyone should trying to be believed. Fatigue that doesn’t lift with sleep, symptoms that seem invisible to everyone outside of you, and a medical system that may have sent you …
Beyond the Hot Flash: The Nervous System Connection in Menopause
There is a version of the menopause transition conversation that most women are familiar with. Symptoms appear, a doctor is consulted, a prescription is considered. The focus stays almost entirely on what is going wrong and how to manage it. What gets left out of that conversation, more often than not, is the possibility that something meaningful is happening here. …
From Dismissed to Diagnosed and Supported: A Patient-First Approach to Long COVID, ME/CFS, Fibromyalgia and Other Complex Chronic Illness
Living with long COVID and other chronic illnesses like ME/CFS and Fibromyalgia comes with many challenges, from delayed diagnoses to limited care options. However, patient-centered approaches are beginning to shift how these conditions are understood and treated. In this blog, you’ll explore insights from Dr. Ric Arseneau and Dr. Jane McKay, whose work highlights more compassionate, multidisciplinary models of care …
Glimmer Stacking
✨Glimmers✨ (and a trigger warning) I saw a pink daisy mug recently and had to have it. I’m not a big impulse shopper in that way, I’m actually not a huge shopper in general. But the whimsy brought me immediate visual joy and I know the value of steady, consistent glimmers being built into my everyday life. For almost as …
Pneumonia, the doctor would have missed it except for this… (and why I view it as a sign of healing)
I have pneumonia at the moment and I’m acutely aware of how different this experience would have been 10 or so years ago when I first became chronically ill with Lyme and co-infections. The general medical lens of someone with my current complex chronic diseases (ME/CFS, MCAS, POTS etc.,) developing pneumonia, is obviously not great. Patients with these conditions are …
I Need to Name Something I’m Seeing in the ME/CFS, MCAS, POTS / Complex Chronic Disease Community
I need to name something that others, and I have been seeing a lot of online recently, that I feel does more harm than good to the ME/CFS, MCAS, POTS, Complex Chronic Disease Community that it claims to serve. Lately I’ve been seeing a lot of content creators sharing how they’ve miraculously recovered (sometimes “overnight”) from these illnesses. Many of …
Defeated and Grateful: Holding Duality and Living Wholly
A natural result of committing to this inner work is it tends to expand one’s capacity for duality. To hold multiple things at once. To allow two seemingly opposing things to be true, simultaneously. I am sitting here this evening both devastatingly defeated and overwhelmingly grateful. I am watching as my partner modifies our home yet again to meet our …
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