The Healthy Life Coach

Two years ago I was desperately searching for something, ANYTHING, to cure my symptoms of interstitial cystitis (IC). This is when I found Abigail on an IC website. Now I am left searching within myself – body, mind, and soul – with no goal or intention to heal my bladder pain, BECAUSE IT’S NOW GONE! Abigail has helped me to see that we CAN heal ourselves not only physically, but more importantly mentally and emotionally. Abigail is a non-judgmental, funny, and extremely kind mind-body coach who has helped me see that pain is a messenger who is only trying to bring ourselves back to our true selves where we can experience happiness and peace. My pain popped up when my body couldn’t take anymore pressure on myself – pressure to be the smartest, nicest, most beautiful, most determined (etc. etc.) person on earth! Abigail has helped me increase my mind-body awareness with various exercises, reminded me of the importance of daily play, helped me re-learn how to breathe properly, coached me through various “problems” in my life to make them into more enabling, positive situations, and much much more!! All of this has helped to diminish my symptoms of IC and lead me on a path I never even knew existed. Abigail is an amazing coach and I am so very grateful that I found her. Coaching with Abigail has been nothing but a positive and exciting experience! Now I truly believe that everyone should have a life coach!!!

Meghan

I suffered with chronic pelvic pain starting in my mid-twenties and stretching into my late forties. Today I have found much relief with Martha Beck life coaching and mind-body healing tools and have come back to enjoying life. A few years ago I was at a very low point with my pain. My hip and knee were hung up with pain making it difficult to bend down without flaring up. I had chronic pelvic pain, urinary urgency and frequency, sore vagina, nocturnal muscle camps in my rectum, was not sleeping well and had low energy and was losing the desire to live. I tried medication, chiropractors, acupuncture, internal physical therapy, resting, diet, naturopathy, psychic work, cutting my work to half-time and much more without satisfying results.

I improved after attending a pelvic pain clinic and learned about trigger points in my muscles which cause myofascial pain. After over 20 years of suffering I finally knew that my pain was in my muscles and I had a way to relieve it and help my muscles to relax. What was missing was how to prevent my muscle tension in the first place. The pelvic pain clinic included relaxation meditations which I did for a year, but I was still experiencing flare-ups around emotional tension and stress in my life.

In spring 2009 I connected with Abigail for the live Healthy Mind Toolbox telecourse. While working with Abigail I truly came to understand the tension in my muscles is caused by stuffing my emotions which are caused by my thinking. I put into place daily practices which have helped me immensely to tune into feeling my emotions and to change what I am thinking to truer and better feeling thoughts and in the process relax my muscles and ease my pain. A huge part was learning to welcome the physical sensations of emotions and to feel them rather than resist them. Practicing yoga has also been a big help. Once my trigger points began releasing I could exercise again and yoga helps to keep me limber. I have gone back to doing many of the physical things I love such as swimming in the cool rivers and lakes, backpacking, dancing and gardening among other things.

My journey included being on a restricted diet for candidiasis for over 25 years. I didn’t eat anything sweet for the last 10 years including fruit. I finally got some help from a clinical nutritionist who diagnosed me with low stomach acid for which there was a simple fix. Also, Abigail helped me with the new thought that nothing I eat causes my symptoms and that definitely made a difference. Today I can eat anything I want and take daily pleasure in my meals. I know now that the symptoms I thought were an overgrowth of yeast in my body was actually from adrenal fatigue caused by being in the fight/flight/freeze mode so much which caused my hormones to get out of balance resulting in vaginal soreness and pelvic pain.

Today I regularly sleep through the night without getting up to pee, have more energy, eat any food I want, have sex more often, and am much more active. I am in the midst of changing my career to something I am passionate about. I am more in touch with who I am and what motivates me. I put less pressure on myself, my family and coworkers which has created more harmony. When I have physical symptoms instead of focusing on the symptoms I explore where else in my life I need to feel my emotions and work on that issue. I’m still getting the hang of being emotion smart and I am gentle with myself. This is a process and I still have ups and downs, but the plateaus of feeling better are gradually getting longer and the periods of feeling worse are getting shorter.

Gail

Thank you, thank you Abigail!! I found your web site a few weeks ago, read every one of your blogs going back to 2000, and was inspired by your words of wisdom. My pain began in June and I was barely able to attend our daughter’s wedding. In July I was not satisfied with my doctor’s answers and began my own research. The pain began in my back and progressed into the bladder and pelvis. I was determined to go cold turkey and not use any pain killers or other medications. At times the pain was excruciating. In the beginning I was bed ridden most of the day. By the end of July I found an excellent pelvic pain physical therapist in Austin Texas but continued my research as too much was still questionable. In September I found Dr. Sarno’s book, believed what he had to say but wanted more information. There were far too many unsolved pieces in this puzzle. I found Dr. Schubiner’s web site and began reading Jon Kabat Zinn’s mindful meditation book. I also read Dr. Schubiner’s new book. I found your web site in October on Dr. Schubiner’s site.

I was totally blow away by what you had to say. I could not stop reading. I listened to all the discussions and watched all the videos. Immediately I downloaded Martha Beck’s book on my iPad. Your advice put all the puzzle pieces together.

At the moment I am a work in progress and am very happy with the results. Although the pain is slowly receding, it is no longer the primary issue. I am determined to be the mistress of my life. I will not allow my repressed emotions to control my life. ENOUGH. I am 62 years old–finally finding myself. And you know what, I really like what I am finding.

Abigail, you are a beautiful woman both inside and out. I feel blessed to have benefited from your advice.

With gratitude,
Grace

When Abigail gave me the assignment in our coaching sessions to write about my life as a heroic journey, I was nowhere near thinking there was anything heroic about it. Actually, I was in the phase of learning how to give up. All my life I have struggled to achieve things: career as a professional writer and academic, circle of honest friends, fulfilling relationship and a space I would call home. Whether it was down to my family or society where I grew up, I was definitely programmed to think of success as an upward trajectory. I emphasize the word ‘struggle’ because on my way climbing UP to success, I have suffered and struggled, often to my own detriment. For example, I would cling to people and situations with an unhealthy commitment because my mind had told me that to release them or give them up would mean failure. I couldn’t bear to be a failure.

I rarely listened to the signs that my own body would give me: the queasy feeling in my stomach or a headache when I would stick too long in a situation that was sucking my energy dry. I invested tons of energy trying to FIX friendships and relationships that had long before gone bad or had fulfilled their purpose. In intimate relationships, I tried to SAVE partners to the point that I would completely forget about myself, my own direction in life and my right to creative and connected expression. I NEVER asked for anything for myself and I moulded myself to fit the needs of others. And when the saving mission wouldn’t work, as it normally doesn’t, I stayed even longer, thinking and feeling that something was wrong with me: I was a failure again.

Whatever feedback I received from others – from being unappreciated at my university or literary circles in the country of my origin to being told that I was a bad girlfriend – I interpreted that as my failure. It never occurred to me that another interpretation was possible, that I might be wasting my time with the wrong people and at wrong places and that my own individuality, no matter how much it didn’t fit with the expectations of others, was actually the greatest gift and resource I had. I’ve spent the first 33 years of my life doubting myself and thinking I was an outcast who had to TRY twice as hard to feel accepted and appreciated.

In a few long-term relationships I had, I frequently suffered from bouts of bacterial cystitis. My wise body was giving me signs that intimacy at the expense of my own well-being was a very destructive way to be. I turned the blind eye to those signs and I treated my illness with countless courses of antibiotics, always going back to those unhealthy patterns. It wasn’t until 2 years ago when I woke up one morning with the strong pain in my pelvic area that I realized I was utterly and very successfully rejecting myself. The pain grew stronger regardless of the aggressive antibiotics I was prescribed to take for a month. The doctors didn’t know what was wrong with me and most of them implied that ‘I was exaggerating’ or that ‘everything was in my head’. I turned to alternative medicine, yet even the natural approach – herbs, acupuncture and all kinds of supplements – kept me locked in the thinking there was a magic pill somewhere outside of me that could erase my suffering.

I was at my lowest ever – I felt like a wounded animal with no one and nothing to turn to. There was no light at the end my the tunnel. The man I was with at the time kept saying that my illness was tearing us apart, that I was guilty our relationship was falling to pieces and that I wasn’t trying hard enough to fix things. If I cried in desperation in front of him, he shouted at me and told me I was being impossible. I lost my sense of proportion so much that I actually hoped to be well again only so that I could please him. The prospect of being abandoned by him was my biggest nightmare – and that was very much connected to a great loss I suffered in my childhood – so I was prepared to do anything just to keep him. I couldn’t see that he had never been on my side to being with. The more I kept quiet about my pain in front of him, even having sex when it was unbearably painful, the more my body screamed to be heard. Then, I reached the point when I could hear only one thought in my mind: I don’t care about anything or anyone any more, I just want to be well and peaceful. I stopped caring if I would ever get published in the UK, if I would finish the PhD, if I would lose all friends, if he abandoned me, if the world thought I was a nut-case. Something broke in me. The whimpering and screaming pain in my body shook me so hard that I had no other option but to give up. Give up on everything but my own life on the most organic level. I saw it as a quest for survival of my cells and my soul.

For a long time I struggled against the pain, but when the giving up impulse came, it became clear to me there was no other way but to accept it. Then, by miracle (though in retrospect, I know I produced that miracle myself) I found Abigail Steidley, a Martha Beck life coach, who uses mindbody approach to heal pelvic pain. Actually, it was more about the nature of the pain (chronic and unexplained by Western medicine) than the location of it that mattered in her techniques. I started working with her on a daily e-mail basis. What was bewildering in the beginning was that we didn’t talk about the pain exclusively. She opened my eyes to how I was thinking and feeling about myself in regard to intimate relationships and my perfectionist tendencies which defined success and failure concepts. My whole life suddenly got rearranged and rethought. New paradigms entered, new compassion for myself slowly evolved. We worked on every single thought that created stress in my body. I learned how to observe my thinking patterns and most of all how to accept and process my emotions, instead of suppressing them. The impression I had after only 2 months of coaching was that I went for it to heal my body, but I ended up healing my life. The first lesson I learned that brought along tangible results was that ‘I cannot make anyone happy and no one else can make me happy’. It was all about learning my responsibilities: my happiness can and is my responsibility and other people’s happiness is theirs, and so I learned where and how to draw that line. I then left the man I was with. The fear of doing it was enormous but every cell of my body knew it was the right decision.

Getting in touch with my own body and my inner voice slowly showed me that my pain was connected with how I was undermining myself in relations to others and generally doubting my authentic expression. I believed once I left that unhealthy relationship, the pain would disappear completely. Several months after the break-up, I was emotionally better than ever, but the pain still persisted, though weaker than before. If up to that point there was work on thoughts and emotions, something that could still be tangibly explained and rationalized, from then on I entered the mystical underworld where my soul had to reinvent itself. The other side, the darkness, the abyss, whatever you call it, opened up and I fell into it simply because again I had no other choice. Abigail and I then worked more on my relationship with the pain itself, as I realized that fear about having the pain for the rest of my life was actually creating and sustaining it. I had all the tools to guide myself emotionally in everyday life, but I was powerless in the face of my biggest challenge: pain. And pain was with me 24 hours a day.

I used to imagine the pain had a shape, colour and voice of its own. Every day, I was in a dialogue with my pain: I tried to reassure it that it was safe to talk to me, that I would listen and heed it, and when I could hear its message, I committed to following its advice. This lasted for months with very little tangible progress. I remember I used to cry a lot when I realized how neglectful and cruel I was to myself. But the meekness wouldn’t last very long, soon I would get in a rage with the pain. I wanted it gone more than anything. My whole soul-searching adventure had only one aim: to get rid of the pain. So, there I was again, climbing UP the ladder of my success.

At this stage, I started meeting more and more people who had important messages for me. I was sure not to miss them this time. One of the most important messages came from Arielle Essex, an NLP practitioner who cured her own brain tumour. She opened me to the perspective of how my pain always had a positive intention for me. Slowly I was able to ease into what used to be a counter-intuitive state of mind for me: I learned to welcome my pain as my best friend. If all this sounds very structured and cerebral, believe me it wasn’t. Acceptance is not an action: we don’t DO acceptance, we ARE acceptance. And so there is no rulebook for it, no mapped out territory to follow. Maybe there are intellectual concepts which can be passed down by an inspiring teacher to you, but the path and the process of acceptance is our own journey. I call this journey DARK, not because it is negative, but because when you are on it, there is nothing to hold on to. Your only way is to ease into the silent strength of your soul which begins exactly in the moment when you detach yourself from everything known (even from what your teachers have told you). Acceptance is a religious experience.

Being a writer, I have always sensed the power of storytelling. Yet, my relationship with my pain and the dark journey I was on revealed another dimension of stories. Apart from emotional engagement that stories can evoke in people, stories can heal too. When we identify with positive stories, they can open up new meanings of our suffering. This occurred to me when I watched one of my favourite films ‘The Abyss’. The main character goes down into the unknown, bottomless abyss deep in the sea to save a civilization of friendly and intelligent extra-terrestrials. He takes that path not knowing if he would survive. The impulse to do something for the greater good, even if he loses his own life, starts off the inexplicable process of miracles. As he falls further and further, all laws of physics stop and the more he gives up his desire to control the outcome, the stranger things happen to him. He not only survives and saves the civilization, but he returns a transformed and cleansed man. Of course, this story uses the geographical space of abyss as a symbol of any unknown journey we set out to. I was not interested in the deep sea references as much as I was in the message it had for me: I knew that I had to LET myself GO into the unknown, and the unknown for me was to accept the pain completely without knowing if it would ever go away. It was a RISK. And for every risk there needs to be the same amount of faith in us. As I shared this story with a friend of mine, I told him I had been feeling like Alice in Wonderland, falling deeper and deeper down the rabbit-hole. He replied: you are not Alice in Wonderland, you are a Wonder in Yourland.

I know this story needs to have tangible results for you to believe it. So I will share them with you. After 2 years of non-stop pelvic pain, I am completely pain-free today (solely by using mindbody approach and no medicine). I have spent a year of deeply satisfying time being on my own – getting to know and trust myself. I gave up the desire to HAVE a fulfilling relationship. As miracles happen, I now AM relating to a great man who came to my life. Most of my dysfunctional friendships have dissolved easily and without much work on my part – new people came into my life who don’t ASK from me to make them happy. With them, our life energies grow bigger, instead of one person feeding off another. I am writing both my PhD and my novel with more creative energy than I ever had. What matters most to me now is that I allow myself complete freedom and authenticity, not caring about moulds I need to fit. Recently, I started a process of buying a flat. Though I discovered that having a home is important to me, the social pressure about how you should buy and own your home pushed me in a situation which felt wrong to me. My body gave me a sign that I could read now and so I pulled out of the buying deal. You can imagine what challenge that was: I gave up the flat I could have bought just because it DIDN’T feel right to me. And this time, I didn’t feel like a failure. A week later, I found a perfect flat that I am renting and making it my home.

More than anything, I have learned that success comes in many intangible forms. The ONLY thing that matters and is worth pursuing is the inner transformation of our being. This lasts for ever. This is not conditioned by other people’s reactions or approval and can not be destroyed by outside forces beyond our control. Our path, dotted with challenges that we so often see as mistakes, is our success. You cannot imagine what strength lies in giving up and letting go.

With all my love,
AP

It’s been a month since my life coaching with Abigail finished and now looking back over the experience, I truly feel that I have made great and lifelong changes to the way I think about not only my physical pain but also every aspect of my life. When I found Abigail I had been suffering from chronic pelvic pain for over five years.

Like most sufferers of this sort of seemingly never-ending and all-consuming pain, I experienced life under an almost constant state of anxiety and worry. My mind was cluttered with all sorts of negative thoughts about my symptoms many of which I am sure you’ll recognize.

“I’ll never get better.”

“This is the worst pain ever.”

“I’ll never be able to enjoy my life.”

However, through my coaching I was able to break down these negative thoughts and replace them with more positive and true alternatives. Where finding substitutes for these thoughts was too difficult Abigail showed me a way of removing labels from the thoughts to decrease the anxiety they produced. For example, if I was worrying about attending an event because I had decided it “would be too difficult” with my symptoms I simply removed the words “too difficult”; the statement “It will be” has become my own personal mantra as it allows me to accept situations as they come.

So maybe you’re wondering where my pain fits into all of this mind work? Well the coaching works to change the way you think about your pain which makes the pain easier to deal with. I discovered that I was constantly checking in on my pain, constantly aware of it.

“Are you there pain? How about now? And now?”

When my “check-ins” concluded that I did indeed have pain, I’d freak out which when you have a chronic pain condition means you’re spending an awful lot of time freaking out and putting everything else on hold. For me it was important to learn to accept my pain when I had it but also to accept and enjoy the time I didn’t have it! This brings me onto another point. For years and years I had been missing out on things I enjoyed and loved because I was so worried that pain would show up and ruin everything. Although it was extremely difficult for me to realize at first, Abigail showed me that it was not my pain that was causing me to miss out at all but rather it was my thoughts about my pain. Looking back now I am sure that half the time all this worry actually caused the pain! What’s more, where had I gotten this idea that I could not enjoy myself if I was in pain? Through changing my thoughts about this I made attempts to go out even if I was in pain and many times I was surprised to discover that because I was no longer checking in with my pain I was able to enjoy myself perfectly fine!

Another wonderful thing about Abigail’s coaching is that it takes into consideration everything about the person and together you work on becoming an overall happier and more peaceful being. The coaching extended above and beyond my pain and anxiety to other areas of my life which naturally are all connected at the core. My extreme worry of what people think of me, my lack of confidence in myself, my reaction to the world around me; everything area of my life that caused negativity within me were worked upon to change the way I think and soon I was learning a new meaning to the word “acceptance”.

For five long years I tried and tried to find answers and solutions to who I was and what I was going through but I know now that the most important thing is to have trust in myself, that I have everything I need to make my own recovery and that right now I am alive, strong and ready for wherever my future takes me.

It will be.

Life is going wonderfully for me at the moment, I’m really happy and still incorporating everything Abigail taught me into daily life, I’m finding that I’m having less and less negative thoughts and that when I have them I’m able to turn them around much quicker and easier than before which is wonderful. My anxiety levels are at an all time low, I feel so much more confident I even spoke up in a room full of strangers at training at the weekend which is something I would never have done before. I haven’t had any pain for a long time.

Katie

I am 52 years old and had struggled with various pain syndromes for much of my adult life. Fibromyalgia, vulvodynia, fatigue… Like so many of us with inexplicable and debilitating pain, I sought out many kinds of medical and alternative solutions. Some doctors and approaches worked better than others but ultimately they all left me feeling like I was managing the problem, at best and losing the battle at worst!
The particular pain of vulvodynia is doubly hard to address as it is such a strange and intimate pain. How to you even describe it?
Through working with Abigail, this step is unnecessary. She completely understands this pain, and more, having suffered from it herself. This is so important.

I found Abigail while trolling the internet for answers. Imagine a vulvodynia coach! And this was the precise answer for me. Throughout the years I was aware that there was growing evidence and an emerging field called Mind/Body. Whenever I would stop and read something about it, the stories always sounded so much like me. Intense, creative, driven, involved…unconscious, exhausted, depleated, confused…and in pain!

Beyond Abigail’s understanding of the the pain is her understanding of how to help you walk out of the maze of this condition. Because, you see, the mind body approach suggests that your body has been taught to respond using pain. So you need to teach and guide yourself out of this into a new way of feeling. Does it sound impossible? Not once I started to read a lot about recent brain science and the growing volumes of writing on mind/body medicine. Start with a book called The Divided Mind by Dr. John Sarno if you want to understand the basics. But if you have any of the symptoms described here you will save lots of time and money by tapping Abigail’s immense knowledge base.

I went from having symptoms 100% of the time to having symptoms %10 of the time in about 7 months. It takes some dedication to the process but it will not take over your life and you will really grow in other areas of your life while you are minimizing your pain.

Good luck,
F. L.

It’s been a while but I just wanted to drop in and let you know how i’m doing. I’ve been meaning to for a while but to be honest, I rarely think about anything IC or vulvodynia related these days so I always seem to forget. As you can probably guess, i’m doing fabulously well!

K

I wanted to let you know that it is Thursday and I am heading home from a 4 day whirlwind trip to Switzerland which has encompassed 2 transcontinental flights, train rides and sleeping in hotels and I have not woken up with back pain on one single morning!

Roxanne

That was just the re-boot my brain needed. Thank you, Goddess/Universe/Higher Power, etc. for sending Abigail into my life!

Mary

I really appreciate your coaching, time, all of it. I really think you are making huge impacts in people’s lives. I know you have in mine so far. I think I had started to thing this was a mind-body issue, but I needed to have some guidance from someone who beat it (like yourself and a few others) to really make it sink in. Thank you SO SO much.

Dayne

Thanks so much for all help and all I’ve learnt. I sure look at many things differently now than I used to. But I realize I have to work on my mental health the same way as one needs to work on the physical to stay in shape, exercising the mind and body.

Berit