Welcome to the Phoenix Helix podcast dedicated to autoimmune resilience.

Today, I have a mindset minisode for you, so let's dive right in.

Thank you. Hey everyone. So today's mindset minisode, we're going to be talking about writing a letter to our body.

So with autoimmune disease, we've been told that our body is attacking us, which sets up war imagery in our minds. We suddenly believe that our bodies want to hurt us instead of help us,

and when we're living with pain and disability, that certainly seems to be true, right? But what if our bodies actually want to protect us,

and with autoimmune disease, they've become overprotective.

What if modern life has simply overwhelmed our bodies

and they're doing everything they can to survive?

I think a key to living well with autoimmune disease is learning to befriend our bodies

because we are not separate from them, right?

Our bodies are our home.

So when we get furious with our bodies and hate our bodies, all of that furious energy gets directed

toward ourselves. Now it's understandable to feel this way when we are suffering, but it's not a

healing mindset. So there's a parallel here that's interesting to consider. We want our body to stop attacking itself.

Are we willing to do the same mentally and emotionally?

So the practice I want to introduce today, like I said, is writing a letter to your body,

which I think is the first step to developing a friendship with your

body, or maybe not even the first step. You might be on a path to befriend your body. I think it's a

way to communicate and honor the complexity of the relationship of an autoimmune body,

and it can just be a really powerful practice if you've never done it before.

So the goal of this letter isn't just to focus on gratitude, but to provide an outlet for all the

complex emotions you feel about your body right now. So if you listen to the last mindset minisode where I shared the rain technique, I talked about how important it is to express emotions rather than repress them because repressed emotions can actually increase inflammation.

...