When, despite experiencing initial symptoms, you still have finer sensation in your hands and feet, arms and legs:
It is time to heal.
When you are suffering from intense pain and restricted mobility:
It is time to heal.
When you feel sad, hopeless, and exhausted:
It is time to heal.
When health exists only in your memories of better times:
It is time to heal.
Is there really no time?
Are other matters more important?
My goals are most effectively achieved when I am healthy!
Pursuing my aspirations is much easier and more successful without rheumatoid arthritis.
My stress-related rheumatoid arthritis meant both a chance of healing as well as my own personal rat race, where I just stayed in the same spot.
The suffering caused by the disease can help define one’s priorities more clearly and bring about a more insightful experience. That was the chance I used to get out of rheumatoid arthritis for:
The inflammatory pain made stress, tension and overburdening in my body more obvious and thus easier to eliminate.
Albeit cruelly, the pain allowed me to increase my sensitivity in the regions I had overloaded by moving and posturing my body in a harmful manner. That was the chance to improve my body perception. Today, I can clearly identify which sensations indicate or don’t indicate an overload in everyday life. For example, when I do my stretching exercises, I can distinguish between excessive tension and the slight, painful pulling that comes with stretching.
As long as I did not recognise this chance, I resigned to trying to heal and, in the absence of any other solution, had accepted medication as a constant companion. In addition, I felt my life was meaningful and satisfying because my rheumatoid arthritis was by no means all that made me special. Resignation relating to healing can lead to the momentous attempt to integrate the disease as an integral part of one’s life. You get used to it. You settle in. You rationalise: I’m already doing everything possible. My actions are reasonable. It’s the only, right and best thing I can do in my situation. And so I was caught up in an inner hamster wheel.
This doesn’t mean that a life with rheumatoid arthritis isn’t worth living. Because it is. In passing on my experience, I am only trying to describe how I managed to heal RA.
As I was adjusting to life with rheumatoid arthritis, back then was a milestone in my downward spiral of physical decline. Because we don’t just stay the way we are right now. That’s why we need daily training for both our bodies and our minds.
So I told myself: When I am long-lasting and/or severely burdened by illness and medication, this will immediately result in negative consequences for my performance and thus my future chances.
It isn‘t necessarily my momentary condition that should motivate me for change, but rather what this condition can lead me to become.
We can primarily prevent helplessness and reduce injury risks through healthy, anatomically correct movement as part of a healthy lifestyle. For example, we demand our mental skills by training for effortless and unrestricted mobility, quick strength, and perseverance. One acts on the other.
The more unencumbered our bodies are by diseases and medications, the healthier we can be when exercising. My healing from stress-related rheumatoid arthritis contributed significantly to this. This did not simply mean to me that when pain, inflammation and chronic progression ended, everything was as before, because some of the “before” had led to the RA.
Healing brought with it a better understanding of myself. I learned more about my physical, emotional, and spiritual concerns and how they affect my relaxation and tension.
The better our fundamental understanding of healthy posture and movement, the more positively we can affect our relaxation and commitment, even in challenging situations, which in turn relieves the body, soul, and mind, with protective and strengthening effects.
In the absence of this basic understanding, even athletes can overload themselves and become injured as a result.