Chronic Illness + Paragon Complete (PC + ?)

Journals - Major Programs
#1

Introduction:

History - I’ve had an unknown chronic illness since I was an 8 years old little girl, my whole life doctors would keep sending me home because blood tests would always come back normal. I progressively got worse throughout my life, slowly losing everything: the ability to work, to finish my education, to do activities outside the house, to have friends, to get dressed, to stand, to sit, to have a conversation. At the end I was completely bed bound and stuck in a dark bedroom unable to tolerate light, sound, movement, conversation, thinking, anything.

Diagnosis - Then after a harrowing round of doctors appointments that my fantastic awesome sweet partner got me through, I finally got my diagnosis! A huge relief!
I have POTS, an autonomic nervous system disorder that f*cks up all automatic processes in the body, especially when standing up. My subtype is a cross of noradrenergic and hypovolumic, which means that my body overproduces norepinephrine constantly especially when upright, and my blood volume is continuously too low. Low as in not enough volume, so it is low the way someone bleeding out due to a wound is low on blood volume. No wonder my brain would just completely stop functioning when I was upright, it wasn’t getting any blood!

My situation now - After my diagnosis I started medication and treatment and it was a huge relief! For the first time in my life my baseline is going up instead of down. My quality of life has hugely improved and luckily I found a few health care professionals willing to help me and go above and beyond.
But recently I have hit a plateau in my baseline increase. I am stuck on exercise intolerance causing me to physically fail my rehabilitation physical therapy time and time again, as well as my sitting upright more schedule where we slowly increase sitting times. I just keep having setbacks that completely reset my progress to 0 and cause me to lose all the muscle I managed to fight back on. As a result I am still bed bound 3 years after diagnosis.
My base mentality has always been to want to push and do more, but these past years I have had to learn pacing. It is a hard thing to accept that resting IS being productive for me, and that being consistent every day in small amounts is better than doing one big effort and then crashing to a point where my body can’t do anything for weeks. Pacing is a hard lesson I still have difficulty mastering.

Subs - My family member was getting such promising results on subliminals that I finally relented when they asked me to give Paragon Complete a try as supplement. I didn’t track the first month because it was sporadic and not really scheduled, but come September I decided to really go for it and give it an honest chance!
I’m looking forward to saving up and getting oriented on what other subs might be great for me to buy and build out my own stack :slight_smile:

Wish me luck :four_leaf_clover:

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#2

September 2024

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Paragon Complete, cycle 1 (21 days)
September recap:

  • 1 sept: First day of waking up after a 15m loop I was noticeably different from my usual mornings. Even my partner commented on the difference. Huge reduction is dissociation symptoms. I felt connected, present, and much less emotionally and physically dissociated. I was in a very good mood, everything felt light and fun. No fatigue, waking up and starting the day was easy. Wanted to get moving before meds etc. A relief to feel more like my normal self again.

  • Started with full 15 min cycles but quickly had to drop listening times as I hit a lot of fatigue and sleepyness. The rest of the cycle was spent building up listening times, starting at very short times.

  • The first half of the cycle I had insane dreams of deceased family members that had me waking up convinced they were still alive. When awake I had to actively argue with myself to remember they were in fact still dead.

  • Around 3/4th of the cycle with the small loops I started to wake up with more energy and less fatigue throughout the day. I Needed less caffeine/electrolytes to feel good throughout the day. Less pain on those days as well.

  • On day 13 I spontaneously started on the ergometer. Something that has been available to me for years but has been too intense and scary to pick up. I used it regularly for very short times during the cycle and never once experienced a crash from my exercise intolerance. It seems my subconscious was much better aware of how much I could safely do than my conscious self. Usually I go way too hard and too fast and then crash for a week of PEM, but now I would find myself randomly wandering off after a few seconds/minutes. It was very unlike me but I went with it, I decided to trust that the subconscious knows what it’s doing.

  • Emotionally less numb. Mentally less norepinephrin-y, feel slightly more grounded. PC is definitely working on some blockages and limits here, feel my thoughts and opinions on some topics changing. Thinking of what my life will look like going forwards or thinking about how much of my life I’ve lost no longer sends me into existential dread

  • After a few days of washout I started to feel sick (7th day of no paragon). Feverish, nose and face stuffy. A lot of sleeping and being miserable, lasted two and a half days. The whole washout week I had neck pain and discomfort. The day before it was time to start listening again I felt very energised and extremely eager to listen to paragon. Like my body was ready to go.

Love Bomb 4 Humanity
Sporadic uses september:

  • 1minute: The first time was amazing. As someone with dissociation symptoms it was fantastic to feel so many good emotions! At one point I really did feel a sort of love aura wafting off me, so I leaned into it and made it a meditation where I sent all this love and good vibes to individuals and my surroundings.
  • Second time I listened with my partner to try it out. He felt great and had a good two days, after that he was kind of snippy for a good 5 days there. Very unlike him. For me the second listen didn’t have much effect though. I enjoyed watching him have a good time but didn’t have any big feelings like the first listen did.
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#3

great to hear you are doing well with PC.

You can shorten the washout to 5 days or 3 days. If 7 days is too much for you.

And make sure you are taking the required multi-vitamins for the body to rebuild.

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#4

What do you mean by that?

Thought is a spiritual activity. Our thoughts can create a vibrant connection between us and the Divine. Even meditation, where you “let go of thoughts” is a type of thinking. One way to look at spiritual phenomena such as hard-to-heal problems is through the concept of resonance.

What we constantly hold-on into our mind will become our reality. Imagine changing something about your approach to a guided visualization, imagine yourself having the best health posible. If you do this faithfully can lead to profound insights and experiences. The goal is not just to make it work better but to deepen your connection to the process and explore its potential. You have the freedom to experiment, to make subtle changes to your approach. After every visualization + the subs, take a moment to reflect on your experience.

Always reflect on the experiences. When I experience having a bad day, or bad emotions I just keep myself aware on that until it melts away. But if it is a good thing, and I keep being thankful (grateful) even if it just a small thing. Love Bomb or LBFH is amazing but most people didn’t know that. You can trick the mind most of the time but the heart knows, it has the power to move, to change everything for the better.

You may not understand clearly why, until you experienced it yourself.

#5

It is a good idea, next time I will do a 5 day washout for sure, I’m hoping that goes better than last time.

I’m taking daily multivitamins, electrolytes, etc. I’m still experimenting with what works on the more fatiguing days. It is a little difficult to determine the difference between recon and parasympathetic (rest&digest) activity, I know when my body is in a healing phase it feels like more resting need and sleepyness, so that might not always be recon. I’m just taking it slow and building up while finding out what recovery tools my body needs :slight_smile:
Thanks for the tips!

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#6

What I meant is Dissociation causing a reduced perception of my physical senses and emotions, they are muted as if someone has thrown many thick blankets between my perception and the experience.
My baseline mood is actually higher than average and I’m blessed to not suffer from depression or anything like that despite my circumstances.
I have emotions, they exist, they are just very hard to perceive as my consciousness seems to have taken a step back from processing all of it. This is due to my medical condition (autonomic nervous system dysregulation and reduced blood volume to the brain causing processing issues) but also medication I take worsens it and a coping mechanism adopted in the past against chronic pain, trauma, and discomfort. I feel my body/brain is in survival mode due to how ill I am and is categorising that stuff as unnecessary noise to be filtered out, and focussed more on getting food, sleep, survive.

I used to be really good at that one zen meditation “smiling from the heart” but trying that this past year was impossible to get there at all as my consciousness has dissociated away from it even though I have plenty of joy and good things in my life. Emotionally speaking it is the difference between knowing you love your partner very much, and feeling active butterflies. Between knowing the stove is hot, and feeling the heat radiate off it when you stand next to it.

So to illustrate before I started paragon I have been spending months on meditation and sensory training exercises to increase perception of things like flavor, smell, touch, pressure, temperature, texture, etc. No results. If someone touched my arm and I was not looking directly at it, I could not tell if they had put 1 or 3 fingers on my arm, or if they were grabbing/pinching it. If a finger touched my arm and slowly increase pressure I could not perceive the increase until the pressure became hurtful. Like there was a layer of thick blankets between the fingers and my skin.

Now with Paragon my consciousness is reclaiming ownership of sensory and emotional input instead of stepping away from it. I find my brain has more processing power in conversations and when I am reading, brain fog is much less, so the brain is no longer regarding it as unnecessary noise to be filtered out. I can feel touch to my skin much more acutely, I can be more present in conversations, I’m starting to feel small butterflies again when I’m hugged, etc. I got a surge when first starting PC and first doing LB4H, but apart from those events it has been a slow steady increase :slight_smile:

I hope that makes some sort of sense? i’ve never before tried to put it into words so this was a new exploration for me as well.

Thanks so much for the insight! I’m definitely going to try this approach. I’ve found since starting PC I’ve actually been less able to sink into a deep meditative state, no idea why. I’ve taken a break from it to see if that helps, but I miss my daily meditation. I’m going to try and do this during my next listening session and see how it goes :slight_smile: deepening my connection to pretty much everything in my life has been kind of the theme for me this past month.
Thanks again!

#7

Counterpoint - letting go of thought is a type of BEING, since you are literally not thinking

Your statement falls squarely in that “I think therefore I am” camp, which I don’t agree with…

Semantics tho haha, I won’t derail the thread further. Carry on!

#8

Most people understand meditation as a practice that helps them cultivate certain states, such as wisdom and compassion, and decrease negative experiences like anxiety and depression.

Most meditation practices you hear about in modern times is a tradition of mindfulness, which involves learning how to be aware of the present moment and cultivating a deeper understanding of your mind and emotions.

They think of it as a “prescription”, or a means to an end, which distorts the power of the practice and the deeper and more subtle ways it can change your relationship with life.

If meditation is only practiced with the intention of gaining peace or getting rid of anxiety, it will likely begin to feel mechanical and arduous over time.

It is very hard to face your own thoughts with no distractions, trying to quiet your mind isn’t technically speaking meditation, but rather a form of concentration.

Stress can make it harder to enter into a state of relaxation and focus during meditation. It can also lead to distracting thoughts and feelings of restlessness.

There are techniques to address stress which includes deep breathing exercises, progressive muscle relaxation, visualization, and mindfulness techniques such as body scans and loving-kindness meditation. By learning to quiet the fight or flight response, we can improve our ability to focus and enter into deeper states of meditation.

Try not to be too concern on what your having, or the reason why your wrong, instead shift your mind to be the person you want. If you attached too much it will become what they call as spiritual bypassing.

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#9

Yeah perspective - not all people have the same.

For I do not seek to understand in order that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand.

We shouldn’t be guided with our thoughts alone, otherwise it will become limited.

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#10

Sorry for not responding for a bit, I caught a bladder infection and am spending a lot of time in bed sleeping and being miserable :sweat_smile:
I don’t do a lot of western quiet mind meditations personally, but most of my treatment routine is based on switching away from the sympathetic nervous system (fight & flight) towards the rest & digest as my body has disautonomia (POTS) and overproduces norepinephrine when upright, so I do have a lot of experience with techniques and medication for reducing the effects of fight & flight. I will re-read your advice when my head is in a better state to absorb the info. Meditating is kind of weird right now due to being ill, but I catch your drift and will try to detach of any preconceived labels, notions and expectations. Moving myself towards the person I want to be is something I can practice in my meditations :slight_smile:

Here’s some of my notes on being ill and PC:

  • 14 oct: anecdote on intuition regarding health: yesterday evening I was doing a new meditation that focussed on removing unwanted things from the physical body and doing a scan, I named fatigue, pain, and uhmm…? “infection!” Just popped into my head spontaneously. I was like “hm weird, sure, let’s go with that, why not”, so I repeated ”infection” multiple times during the meditation. Then I went to sleep, but that night I woke up multiple times feeling much discomfort in the bladder area and what seemed like a mild fever at one point. Come morning I was convinced I have a bladder infection that has just been flying under the radar for a while due to it feeling so different from previous bladder infections and no pain so far. Today the discomfort and pressure in my bladder area, sides, and kidney area is hard to ignore. Very interesting instance of intuition, I’ll have to get tested soon and wait for results.
  • 17 oct: I for sure caught a bladder infection and am spending a lot of time in bed sleeping. I’m keeping around 3 minutes of PC on listening days, but I can tell that my mind has a lot more trouble processing and a lot less bandwidth. After listening I get headaches that feel warm inside my skull, overstimulated, and very sensitive to sensory input like sound and light. I drink and nap a lot and do what I can to take care of my health, including following intuitions on what to eat. (Which is stuff like raw garlic, beets, and ginger tea where normally I’d probably have wanted some comfort food like pasta or spicy noodles). On non listening days I feel a little better every time. The sleep clearly does me well, so I’m moving the listening time from morning to bedtime hoping that will let me keep my current listening times, if not I’ll have to reduce for the time being. Fingers crossed my body can beat this and I can avoid a round of antibiotics this time. Last time was awful and knocked my baseline so far back it took me almost a year to get back to how I was before.
#11

Listening to the subs about an hour before bed worked, I feel good today: no recon or signs of overstimulation/processing difficulty.

Still have a bladder infection but I am feeling a little bit better every day

#12

I’m on my washout, still with a bladder infection and I now caught a virus too. It is hitting me pretty hard.

Due to this my baseline is now obliterated and am back to completely bed bound, and incapable of doing any physical therapy, qigong, moving, or sitting. Again losing muscle and getting more and more deconditioned by the day. Once this is over I’ll have lost all my progress and will have to start completely over again with my rehabilitation exercises for physical therapy and ergotherapy. I’m so disheartened at losing all my progress as it took me years of work to be able to even sit upright for a few hours. I can’t do anything to counteract it, all I can do is rest and sleep.

Don’t worry, I’m ok and have many good things in my life to be grateful for. I’m just writing this as I’m experiencing grief for all my lost progress. Since using PC I’ve had less pain and am using much less painkillers, am effortlessly eating better, getting good nudges from my subconscious, am not experiencing PEM, my muscles are slowly relaxing, and my posture has somehow fixed itself. I am grateful for these changes in my comfort and quality of life :pray: But man, I am not looking forwards to starting over :pensive:

#13

How are you?