My Story

Hi, I'm Pauline and I discovered the benefits of Qigong in 2022, whilst trying to heal from over a decade of living with disabling ME/CFS (Chronic Fatigue Syndrome) and complex digestive disorders.

My life during this decade had gradually become smaller and smaller, as severe fatigue, brain fog and a myriad of other symptoms meant I could no longer sustain normal daily functioning. I’d gone from a vibrant, active, sociable and hard working 42 year old, to not being able to work, walk or leave my house without assistance, and socialising for an hour would leave me in bed for days afterwards.
 
In late 2017 I was getting worse. I felt constantly unwell, toxic, in pain and was relying on sugar, caffeine, alcohol and adrenaline in a bid to grasp moments of normal life, before crashing back down with bedbound fatigue for weeks at a time. And my digestive system was also wreaking havoc, so I started working with a wonderful functional medicine practitioner to help address my gut and toxicity issues.

This was a tricky time, and I had to get a lot worse before getting better. But when you hit rock bottom, the only way is up and I knew I had to build myself up again, but in a new direction, where I treated my mind and body with kindness.

Fast forward to the beginning of 2022 and I’d very gradually made some useful recovery. I no longer felt toxic or constantly unwell, but I had for some time reached a plateau in my healing, and I felt stuck. Although my fatigue had improved somewhat, it was still very much with me, keeping me housebound, and unable to walk more than a few metres. My gut symptoms were being managed, but in the process I had developed more food sensitivities and could only tolerate a handful of 'safe' foods, and I had become very underweight. I needed to find a new approach to my healing, to help unblock my stuckness.

A turning point came when I discovered Nervous System Regulation work. This changed how I saw my illness and I now understood that if I could work on bringing a sense of safety back to my nervous system, then it would come back into a more regulated state and better functioning.

The nervous system is responsible for so much of our bodies' automatic functioning and its main purpose is to keep us alive by responding appropriately to whatever threat we encounter, both from outside of the body and within. It governs our stress response.

Stress comes at us from all directions, be that Mental Stress, Emotional Stress, Physical Stress, Biological Stress or Environmental Stress. It all has an impact and too big a stress load, built up over time, from the moment we are born, can lead the nervous system into dysfunction, which has a huge knock on effect on how the rest of the body behaves. 

I now realised that my nervous system was in a state of dysfunction.  It was perceiving everything as a threat and keeping us stuck in survival mode. I was unknowingly living in a constant stress response. I needed to find ways to bring a feeling of safety and regulation back to my system. This is where qigong comes in.

Qigong is a very beneficial practice for the nervous system. I’d heard of the benefits of qigong to both mind and body, so I started to look up some movements on YouTube. Due to fatigue I wasn't able to do any other form of exercise and my muscles were weak from years of being unwell and sedentary. So I started small, and cobbled together 5-10 minutes of random qigong movements, which were the ones I could remember and manage physically. I found it to be a great thing to do first thing in the morning and pretty soon I noticed that my days which started with my qigong practice were my better days.

 
Shortly after this, I joined a Nervous System Regulation healing programme, which used various tools such as Brain Retraining, Polyvagal Theory and Somatic practices to help bring safety into the mindbody and get the nervous system back into a regulated state. Within this programme they also taught us qigong practices and recommended it for nervous system healing.

Thankfully, through using a combination of all these tools over the past two years, I have been able to make gradual improvements to my health and wellbeing. I am not quite there yet, and my recovery is ongoing, but as I continue to heal, I have learnt to reconnect with my body, bring balance to my mind and re-join the world again, with a sense of joy and compassion for myself, my mindbody and for others. 

Where conventional Western medicine could offer me no hope nor cure, regulating my nervous system and finding joyful, balancing, energy flow practices like qigong, has brought me to a version of myself that I know I was always meant to be, and I feel drawn to share these beneficial practices with other people, who may also be seeking mindbody wellness.

The thing I found with both the qigong routines being taught on the internet and as part of the healing programme I did, was that they could be a bit demanding physically for where I was in my recovery at that time, and for my lack of flexibility and stamina. I wanted to learn a routine that I could practice regularly, regardless of how my body was feeling on a particular day, and without risk of stress on the body or injury. 

This is what led me to attend the accredited Holistic Tai Chi Qigong Training Academy and train to become a certified Shibashi Qigong Session Leader. Not only would I then have a gentler, more accessible, regular qigong practice for myself, but I would also be qualified to share this routine with others, bringing all the benefits of qigong into my local community. This felt like something the new, 54 year old version of me, was meant to do. So she did and Be Well Qigong was born.