Are You Running Away from Yourself?
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“No matter where you go, there you are.” ~Confucius
I am accustomed to not moving. To move was to feel pain—the pain of seeing how worthless I believed myself to be. Sometimes I would sit in the same place for hours, sometimes not leaving the house for days.
By isolating myself, I avoided finding evidence in the outside world that proved how I saw myself was the absolute truth.
My worst nightmare was that others would show me (through what they said or didn’t say, or what they did or didn’t do) that they too found me as rotten as I knew myself to be.
And so, I was often left in the privacy of my own dreaded company. My best friends were the little pills that I could rely on to knock me unconscious. I had neither the tolerance nor strength to face myself, and I often chose the easy way out.
Sedatives, tranquilizers, hypnotics—I lived for them. They provided me respite from the constant agony of my internal voice, which asked, “What’s wrong with me? Why am I so damaged? Why do I hate myself? What have I done to deserve this?” And concluded, “I don’t want to feel again.”
Sleeping was my only escape. And I did more and more of it.
Sometimes I pushed the boundary too far: Like the time when I swallowed enough hypnotics to probably kill a few buffalos. When I simply woke up a few hours later asking for coffee, I lost interest in testing myself that way again.
But when I started realizing I was losing chunks of memory, I knew I had reached my limit. I would bump into people on the street who talked about a party I was at and I had no memory of ever being there, nor the few days surrounding the event.
After deciding to give up making myself unconscious and not moving, I went to the other extreme of moving too fast. I started taking stimulants—various amphetamine-based pills that would kick my body and mind into action so I could move, talk, and think at lightning speed.
I figured if I kept moving, I wouldn’t have to face myself.
I was running away from the same problem, and I thought I had found a better way of doing it.
It helped me manage my social phobia. Whenever I went to a social event, I felt tremendous pressure to appear perfect. Every meeting, every interaction I had with people, was a performance.
My drugs helped me seem more comfortable in my skin than I really was. I felt false and I hated myself for it.
I tried to exude confidence and charm. Many times, I succeeded. But always, I would spend the ensuing days beating myself up for every little incident I imagined had exposed the rotten me to the world.
I began to feel the rage that had been suppressed in me for a long time. Somehow, it didn’t frighten me the way my other emotions did, so I took refuge in it. After suppressing my emotions for so long, I found it quite empowering to act out my aggression.
It gave me a sense of power I never had. Now I can see that it’s something I call “false power”—a false sense of power that’s followed by feeling bad or dissatisfied with ourselves because it comes from a place of fear.
Soon, I was back to sleeping pills, and alternating them with stimulants—one countering the after-effects of the other. I was addicted to both not moving and moving too fast.
One day, it began to dawn on me that somewhere in the middle, between not moving and moving too fast, there’s a whole world of magical possibilities.
I started to get glimpses into this world.
Whereas my options before were limited to the world I saw myself to be trapped in, suddenly it occurred to me that maybe there was another place to look for the joys that had eluded me all those years.
This was followed by more years of trying to find an easy access into this other world within the same world. I dabbled in a variety of spiritual practices, meditation, energy healing, and slower movements, but lacked the patience to persist when no immediate door was opened.
Yoga was too slow, Pilates too brutal, meditation too boring. I judged everything harshly.
Some things were too wacky, others were not wacky enough. It reflected my mind, which had been swinging like a pendulum from one extreme to the other, struggling to come to a balance.
But I did not give up. Slowly, what was being revealed to me was beauty. What an alien concept it was, for I had never known beauty in all my life.
I learned that the other side of pain and false power is authentic power.
Paradoxically, the place where I was to find the joys that had been missing in my life was the very place I’d been running from all my life.
When I reconnected to the parts of me that I had lost, it felt like a coming-home. I learned that self-love is when we come home to ourselves. That relationship which I had sought to destroy turned out to be the very thing that would save my life in the end.
What I realize now is that we can get so
overwhelmed by our imperfections that we don’t see any goodness in ourselves.
In this way, we can destroy our relationship with ourselves thinking we are flawed and beyond redemption. But it will only cut us off from the very source of joy, beauty, and love.
I see so many people addicted to substances and external relationships, believing that is where they can find these things. It will only feed into their deep inner insecurity and create more distance from themselves, the true source of joy.
I see so many people, like I once did, choosing to go to sleep and not be present to the everyday experience. I see many others who can’t stop running from one place to the next, thinking they can outrun their problem.
Freedom is found not by sleeping or running away, but by choosing to be awake and staying here long enough for the magic doors to open.
The act of moving—mindfully, with an attitude of embracing life—will take you from feeling stuck with pain to healing that pain. Move slowly and you can taste the rich array of sensations. Move too fast and you’ll miss the gifts contained in the moment.
When you get vulnerable, feel emotions, and stay true to what you are feeling, you liberate yourself from pain.
As you allow the sensations to be in your body, while gently breathing through it, you invite the natural force of change to renew you with its constant movement.
Through years of my own creation of movement therapy, I’ve cultivated a mindset of self-renewal. I am still discovering more and more goodness in me, and every discovery brings me even more joy.
If you haven’t found what you’re looking for, try adjusting the pace with which you live your life and see if you can find that door to magical possibilities.
About Amyra Mah is a spiritual coach, intuitive counsellor, writer, blogger, and creator of extraordinary treatment programs for addictions and other lifestyle imbalances.
She is passionate about guiding people to find their personal power, spiritual meaning, and a profound sense of comfort within, so that they rise to their magnificence.
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Looking for ?Aftermath: Will the “alternative health movement” learn anything from Jess Ainscough’s death? – Respectful Insolence
It’s been a rather…interesting…weekend.
Friday, I noted the , a.k.a. “The Wellness Warrior,” a young Australian woman who was unfortunate enough to develop epithelioid sarcoma, a rare cancer, at the age of 22. I’ve been
because after her doctors tried isolated limb perfusion with chemotherapy in an attempt to avoid an amputation of her left arm at the shoulder, her tumor recurred, after which she chose not to undergo amputation and instead to embrace the quackery known as Gerson therapy, which . By the time she finished her Gerson therapy, she had become a celebrity Down Under, a frequent media fixture advocating “natural” health and a raw vegan lifestyle, . When her mother developed breast cancer, she, too, used Gerson therapy, . That’s when I first encountered her.
In any event, in December, Ainscough , and on February 26, she died.
provoked far more of a reaction than I had thought it would. When I wrote about Jess Ainscough’s tragic death, I expected that maybe a few of her fans wouldn’t be happy. What I didn’t expect is that hordes of her fans would infest the comments section, and I certainly had no inkling that the post would become one of my highest traffic posts of all time, if not the highest traffic post of all time (which it very well might end up being).
So it’s with a little trepidation that I write this follow up. However, I felt the need when I saw an incoming link from a post entitled
by Laura Schoenfeld, MPH, RD. After emphasizing in bold letters that this is “not an attack on Jess as a person, her character, her motivations, or her beliefs,” apparently having learned from my post that no matter how polite and civil one tries to be writing about Ainscough’s story and ultimate demise will nonetheless provoke nasty reactions from some of the Wellness Warrior’s fans, Schoenfeld goes on to say that her post is about something that’s been bothering her, the use of what she refers to as “persuasive marketing to promote diet and lifestyle choices that are purported to cure a person from any disease or health related concern.” (I’m half tempted right here to ask: Is there any other kind of marketing?) In any case, she observes:
There’s a fine line between an attention-grabbing title and a title that makes people feel fear, and sometimes that line depends on the person who is reading the article. It’s a slippery slope that is difficult to maneuver in the world of online marketing. But it’s one where we absolutely must tread carefully.
Unfortunately, as more and more health “experts” enter the world of online health education, these tactics are employed more regularly and misleadingly than ever. Whether that tactic be fear or false hope, there is a lot of health information being promoted online that is not only inaccurate but potentially dangerous for certain peoples’ health. (And sometimes the inaccuracy comes from omission rather than outright falsification.)
I see it all the time in my nutrition practice where people believe that things they’ve learned about online like a super strict, “clean” diet or alternative “therapies” will make all their health problems go away, and it’s not working for them. Sometimes they’re actually worsening their health by faithfully following well-marketed online health gurus’ advice.
The first thing you need to know is that Schoenfeld runs a website called . Her business is nutritional counseling, and she appears to believe in a form of “paleo diet” to address various health concerns, :
Digestive Disorders
Fertility and Pregnancy
Autoimmune Disease
Thyroid Disorders
Hormonal Health
Amenorrhea
High/Low Blood Pressure
Adrenal Fatigue
Blood Sugar Control
Acne and Skin Conditions
Weight Issues
Child and Family Nutrition
Blenderized Tube Feeds
True, she does say that if you have a chronic health problem that hasn’t been addressed by a physician or naturopath you should do that first. Her mentioning a naturopath, given that naturopathy is a
The One Quackery To Rule Them All, , is not a good sign, nor is her mention of adrenal fatigue, which is . Indeed, the public education arm of the Endocrine Society, representing 14,000 endocrinologists . To be fair, I feel obligated to point out that the woo component on Schoenfeld’s website appears lower than many nutritionists associated with the “alternative health community” , but it must be pointed out that there is at least a little woo there.
Which brings me back to what Schoenfeld thinks the “alternative health community” should learn from the death of Jess Ainscough. At the risk of being too snarky and having another horde come down and attack me, my response to that question would be that the “alternative health community” should learn that there’s no such thing as “alternative” health, medicine, or diet. There are three kinds of medicine: Medicine that’s been shown by science to work, medicine that hasn’t been shown to work, and medicine that’s been shown not to work. The vast majority of “alternative medicine” belongs to the latter two categories. The same is true of the vast majority of diets for health promoted in the “alternative health community.” What Jess Ainscough’s case teaches us is that there really should be no such thing as “alternative medicine” or “alternative health.” There really shouldn’t.
As for marketing, “alternative health” sites live and die by “persuasive marketing.” Testimonials are stock in trade, particularly cancer cure testimonials like, yes, Jess Ainscough’s. I note that she didn’t actually make a that she was claiming that the Gerson therapy had brought her cancer under control , when it was becoming apparent to even her fans that it hadn’t. Yes, she believed it, but that’s what made her so effective. She believed, and she was good at making others believe her too.
So let’s see what lessons Schoenfeld thinks the “alternative health community” should take away. First, there’s this:
The first is, as consumers of health information online, we need to be far more critical about what we’re reading when it comes to health and wellness recommendations, and take everything we read with a grain of salt.
Persuasive marketing techniques can be powerful in communicating a message, and when that message is “do this and you’ll achieve perfect health”, it’s an incredibly dangerous one. I’ve seen multiple patients with eating disorders that developed from following the online advice they read, which caused fear and paranoia around a food as simple as a banana.
OK, this is a good lesson. It’s also highly naive to think that this lesson will be learned by a significant number of people in the “alternative health community.” Here’s the problem. Because “alternative health” claims and alternative medicine consist primarily of medicine that has either not been shown to work or shown not to work, credulity is built in. Claims are made, but they are not made for readers to be skeptical of, as they’re almost always supported not with valid scientific evidence but rather with a combination of testimonials, cherry-picked studies, and conspiracy mongering against “big pharma.” The reason is simple. “Alternative health” practitioners rarely have evidence that passes scientific muster to support their claims. Either that, or they vastly exaggerate what diet and various “alternative” treatments can accomplish.
Schoenfeld warns:
Or that maybe conventional treatment like medication or surgery really is your best option, and it shouldn’t be discounted simply because it’s not “natural.” This includes everything from (medically appropriate) statins and thyroid medication, to amputation and corrective surgeries.
This is why working with a licensed medical professional (or two!) is important when trying to make decisions about your health. You shouldn’t be trying to do this alone using advice given from a health blogger with a weekend-long certification course under their belt, or from a PhD who has never worked with a single patient before.
There are hundreds of ancestral-health minded practitioners who can help guide you through the good and the bad advice you’ve been exposed to online, and to get you on a health protocol that is tailored to your unique and individual needs.
This, unfortunately, is the trap of “integrative medicine,” which claims to “integrate” alternative medicine with conventional medicine. Just having a physician involved in these decisions is no guarantee that the advice won’t be dangerous. Look at . Look at . Look at . Look at . Look at . I could go on and on and on naming doctors who offer dangerous quackery.
Let me repeat that again: Working with a licensed health professional is no guarantee that the advice given will science-based if that health professional is a naturopath, a chiropractor, or another “alternative practitioner” or if that health professional happens to be a practitioner of “integrative” medicine. In fact, such “alternative” or “integrative” doctors tend to reinforce what the patient already wants to believe. There’s a bias, in which patients interested in “alternative health” will seek out and eventually find health care practitioners who will provide them with what they want, and those practitioners tend not to be particularly evidence- or science-based.
Schoenfeld’s next lesson is just as naive:
The second thing we need to learn as health communicators, whether we have our own blog or we are simply sharing information with friends and family, that we need to be forthcoming about our experience with the strategies we are recommending, good or bad.
While there is a lot of pressure on those of us who present ourselves as health experts to look perfect and have perfect health, the reality is that no one has perfect health, and often times the stress of running a business designed to help others with their health can cause it’s own problems for our health.
Again, this is where conventional medicine like drugs or surgery may be helpful when diet and lifestyle are not enough. And it may even mean letting go of the idea that we have complete control over our health and physical wellbeing. Because for as much influence as we have in our health, nobody has complete control over what happens to their bodies.
Jess’s death has brought this issue to a head for me, and I felt compelled to share my thoughts on the problem I’ve been seeing more and more in the online alternative health community. We need to be mindful of the information we consume as well as that which we share with others, and make sure we are not painting a picture of our health advice being more successful than it truly is.
Give up the idea that we have complete control over our health and physical well being? Seriously? That’s the very concept that’s at the heart of alternative medicine, so much so that I’ve called it the , and when you start questioning it you .
If the “alternative health community” were to learn from Jess Ainscough’s the two lessons Schoenfeld wants it to learn, to really take those lessons to heart, it wouldn’t be the alternative health community much longer. That’s exactly why it won’t learn anything. Indeed, my prediction is that it will make excuses and turn on her for not having believed enough, done Gerson therapy correctly, or hewed closely enough to her “Wellness Warrior” raw vegan diet.
March 2, 2015
I have to say I know little about the medical community or the alternative health community, however I do feel that your posts on Jessica seem cruel and unnecessary. I read a few and get the feeling that anyone who doesn’t agree in what you believe in believes merely in quackery. I know if I had cancer I would want the best of both worlds giving the best chance of survival. I don’t ever recall Jess saying that anyone should not take on conventional medicine rather that this was her choice and it was how Jess herself decided to take on her journey. I see Jess as an inspiration in a world where fast processed packaged food is a way of life. I know also you can delete this or put me down for my lack of knowledge but not one of us get out of this life alive.
Not all of us survive but it is how we walk through the journey that matters and the lovely Jessica did so with dignity and grace.
Let her legacy of health and wellness live on for the believers.
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