“Our greatest glory is, not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.”
Oliver Goldsmith¹
I have been free from rheumatoid arthritis for over twenty years!
For over twenty years, there has been no pain, inflammation, or restriction in my body’s movement caused by rheumatoid arthritis.
My sleep is mine again – as long as I like and without a rude awakening.
I feel the touch of my child’s hair beneath my hands again when I caress their head!
Many years back, when I first experienced swelling, pain, and restricted mobility, I only saw the effects of rheumatoid arthritis but not its cause.
The stress and tension I experienced during uncomfortable emotions and sensations had a greater impact on me than I had been aware of or able to manage, and the stress and tension they triggered built up, overloading me, and without my realising, impacting my posture and movement.
In doing my HeilÜben exercises, I experienced that overload made me sick, and by relieving it, I found my way to heal my RA.
Whenever I was overloaded again, however, my symptoms showed again. This reverse effect I’ve witnessed over and over again while I tried to heal.
The joy at my progress made up for the bitter acknowledgement: I had lost valuable time to rheumatoid arthritis, my family and I won’t get back, but although this was almost the worst part of the illness, it doesn’t do any good to ponder about the loss. It would mean wasting even more time and energy than it had already cost over something that is gone.
Fortunately, we all have precious lives in the present. Every single healing effort is worthwhile. Every step, no matter how strenuous, will ultimately pay off. That’s what makes it possible for us to win. And in doing so, my possibilities grew.
Today, I react to certain stimuli differently than I did before healing my RA in a way that allows me to remain healthy.
With my daughter’s questions about this disease and (after my explanation): “You had that too??? I don’t see anything of it!”, I began to review my experiences with rheumatoid arthritis:
“Yes, honey, today we do sports together, and our life is full of joy and movement. When I was ill, I couldn’t even hold your brother with my hands. If I wanted to lift him, I had to embrace him with my arms and laboriously pull him upwards because my fingers were too thick and crooked and badly movable; my whole body ached. At three years old, he helped me close buttons and pick up smaller items from the floor that I couldn’t reach. He learned to deal with my limitations at an early age; he knew, for example, that he was not allowed just to run away because I could not keep up with him…”
So I told her. And, for the first time, I looked back on days, weeks, months and years of pain, fatigue, physical disabilities, and sadness…I saw the whole of it from the onset to the long-desired healing.
I had hated this disease and ultimately thrown it off like a suffocating grey coat – along with any thought of it.
Reports from people who are currently affected by rheumatoid arthritis show me that the first years of their ordeal are often very similar to my own experiences.
Yet while rheumatoid arthritis progressed and spread in both body and life of many others affected by it, I slowly but continuously made my way out of the disease using my HeilÜben exercises.
During that time, I practised, overcame setbacks, kept practising, wrote down my exercises and improved them until I healed. And all this without any specialised prior knowledge, nutritional changes, medications or surgical interventions.
This way, my healing exercises, which I named HeilÜben exercises, came to be. With them, I protected myself from overload.
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