We’re not just getting better at managing illness.
We’re living beyond it.
For much of the world, COVID came through like a freight train. People got anywhere from a little sick to a lot sick, and eventually they recovered and went on with their lives.
But it didn’t end there for everyone.
For far too many of us, COVID stuck around. And around. …and around.
Long after other people stopped talking about the pandemic, people like you were still living with what it had done to your body—and trying to figure out how to get from the life you have now to the one you still believe might be possible.
If you feel like:
Everything takes energy now,
You can’t plan tomorrow because you never know how you’re going to feel until you wake up,
Just getting excited about something makes you tired,
You honestly don’ t know if you’ll ever get your brain back,
and maybe worst of all….
You don’t dare to have dreams anymore, now that long COVID has taken over,
then you’re in the right place.
Because, I’m telling you, girl, I’ve been there.
Chronic Illness stole my thirties from me, and it wouldn't be an exaggeration to say I'm still a little pissed off. I'd gone from being on top of the world: just returned to Montana from living abroad for two years, killing it at the newspaper I owned, remodeling the adorable Victorian home my husband & I lived in,... I felt like everything I'd ever wanted was within my grasp in those months.
...enter mother-freaking Lyme Disease.
You know where this story goes...
I started getting sick with crazy symptoms nobody could explain: relentless fatigue, near-daily migraines, brain fog, food intolerances that seemed to pop up like mushrooms,...and nobody seemed to understand that it all had to be related. I felt like I was going crazy.
I finally went down for the count over the course of a single weekend, and ended up staring at the wall for most of the next three years, a period I now think of as my Zombie Years. After all that, when I ultimately hit bottom physically, I finally tried energy healing—and in 2012, I began learning how to work with my own body that way.
So,…yeah. It took ten years and the fear that I might actually be dying for me to try energy work. And then six months of dedication-bordering-on-mania before, unbelievably, I had my life back.
And then I became obsessed with understanding why.
Not just why I'd gotten sick. Why my body had done all those bizarre, contradictory, seemingly inexplicable things it had done along the way.
Why could I tolerate dairy one week and not the next? Why could doing practically nothing leave me flattened? Why did systems that were supposedly unrelated seem to rise and fall together? Why were some of the things that helped me nowhere on the list of things I was “supposed” to need?
I wanted to understand the body I'd just spent ten years trapped inside.
Fourteen years and many, many clients later, I'm still asking those questions.
I've just gotten a hell of a lot better at knowing where to look.
Turns out, there are a lot more ways into a body than I ever knew.
And after fourteen years of working with bodies, one of the things I've learned is that the place where something stops making sense is often where things start getting interesting.
The afternoon crash might have something to do with what happened at breakfast.
The thing making it impossible to exercise might also be making it impossible to feel excited about dinner with a friend.
The food you've eaten safely for two years might suddenly stop working for you—and the problem may not actually be the food.
The fact that Tuesday was fine and Wednesday flattened you isn't necessarily noise. It might be the clue.
So when something doesn't fit, I want to know why.
Why did you tolerate that yesterday?
What was different on the day you had more energy?
What happened in the hours before the crash?
What changed before a food you'd eaten for years suddenly became a problem?
What disappeared before you noticed that you weren't looking forward to anything anymore?
I don't assume every weird thing your body does means something profound, and these aren't always questions with simple answers. But after years of living in a body that made no sense to me—and then years of working with other people's complicated bodies—I've learned not to dismiss the discrepancies too quickly.
Because sometimes the thing that doesn't make sense is exactly where we find a Way In.
And the Way In isn't always where you expect it to be.
Sometimes the question is energy.
Why can you eat plenty of food and still feel as though your body has nothing usable to run on? Why does an activity that should be easy sometimes take everything you've got?
Sometimes it's the fact that your body keeps changing the rules.
What was different between the day you could and the day you couldn't? What changed before the thing that usually helps suddenly stopped helping?
Sometimes it's a signal you haven't learned how to read yet.
What if your body isn't malfunctioning randomly? What if it's responding to something real—but the information it's responding to isn't something you've identified yet?
Sometimes it's something you've assumed was psychological.
If pleasure, motivation, anticipation or connection have disappeared, what changes when we ask what might be happening biologically instead of assuming this is simply how being sick makes you feel?
And sometimes the connection is somewhere nobody thought to look.
Sleep changes what happens with energy. Hormones affect systems far beyond reproduction. Digestion can change what becomes available to the rest of the body. Sensory load, blood sugar, autonomic function, inflammation and dopamine can show up in places that don't initially seem related at all.
We don't have to know the answer before we begin.
We need a question good enough to follow—and a way to notice what happens next.
You can learn to do this.
You do not have to spend the rest of your life waiting for someone else to explain your body to you.
You can get better at noticing what changes before a symptom changes. You can learn to separate what you actually felt from the story you immediately told yourself about what it meant. You can test an idea gently enough that your body's response gives you information instead of simply flattening you. And when an explanation stops fitting, you can get curious again instead of assuming you've failed.
Over time, your body can become less of a baffling thing that keeps happening to you and more of a body you know how to be in conversation with.
That doesn't mean you'll understand every symptom.
It doesn't mean you'll be able to fix everything yourself.
And it definitely doesn't mean that if you're still sick, you somehow haven't listened carefully enough.
It means you can become a much more capable participant in what happens next.
Because the goal here was never to make you better at being sick.
It's to help you have more choices about how you live.
And sometimes another set of eyes helps.
There are things that are extraordinarily difficult to see from inside your own body.
Sometimes you're too depleted to investigate. Sometimes the signal you're trying to follow disappears the moment you turn your attention toward it. Sometimes you've lived with a sensation for so long that it has become background noise. And sometimes you're looking in exactly the place that makes the most logical sense—and nothing is changing.
This is one of the places where fourteen years of practitioner experience matters.
When I work with someone energetically, I'm paying attention to where her system actually responds. I may notice movement she can't perceive yet, stay with something after she loses track of it, or realize that the place we thought we needed to work isn't where the body wants to go next.
I don't get to decide what your body means.
But I can bring another set of practiced eyes—and another set of questions—to the investigation.
And ideally, you leave knowing more than you did when we started.
So where do you want to go next?
If you're thinking, I want to understand more about my own body and start experimenting with some of this myself, there is plenty here for you to explore.
And if you're thinking, Okay, now I'm really curious what Kari would notice if she looked at me, we can start with a conversation about what's happening and whether private work together makes sense.
