Chronically Chill Self Care is Emerson. They consider themselves a lifelong activist, an active antiracist/colonialist with a background in community engagement. As a non-binary person, they got their start in LGBT organizing, which led them to study public policy. They thought learning the tools of the system might help in dismantling the system, but honestly? It just made them sick. Well, early childhood trauma, chronic stress, and a bunch of environmental factors made them sick. This body is host to a suite of inflammatory diseases known as Central Sensitization Syndrome. Basically, the nervous system is hair-trigger sensitive, which has meant they’ve needed to develop a lot of tools to manage. Imagine your most stressful day – remember the anxiety and heaviness you felt. Remember the engagement of your fight/flight response, how your body tried to keep you safe by signalling danger. That’s your sympathetic nervous system doing its job. Eventually your parasympathetic nervous system kicks in to balance out the reaction, and you chill out. But if you hang out in that fight/flight reaction long enough, your body starts to burn out. It becomes a lot harder to bring yourself out of it. The dysfunction cascades through your nervous system until, eventually, it effects the function of your glands and organs. Your body creates inflammation to protect you, but that just makes it worse. Before you know it, you feel like shit and doctors can’t tell you why. They tell you it’s all in your head – even though, to you, it feels very real. In their experience, these kinds of practitioners have a fundamental misunderstanding of how our environment – including the thoughts we think – shapes the ecosystem of our bodies. They have a very limited understanding of the mind/body connection. After struggling with debilitating chronic illness for years, they developed a care plan that prioritized taking positive actions toward healing in every area of their life. While health is never a guarantee, they’ve learned that certain practices make healthy a lot easier to envision in their chronically disabled body. They started Chronically Chill Self Care to share these tools with you. In their podcast series, “Meditations,” they explore different meditation techniques, interview teachers and experts, and offer a short guided practice so you can find your favorite tools. Chronically Chill meditations are always free because healing should be accessible to anyone.
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