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Food For Your Soul

About the Author
Gretchen Brooks Nassar, MA, CHHC

* At home in Colorado with husband and four felines.
* BA in psychology, MA in English, and a certificate as a Holistic Health Counselor from the Institute For Integrative Nutrition.
* After playing health detective with CFS for twelve-years, healed Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Hypothyroidism, Candida, Hormone Imbalance, Insulin Resistance, and Caffeine Addiction.
* Now a Nutrition, Wellness, and Holistic Health Counselor who helps clients create health plans, eat & live healthier, and heal.

My Healing Journey
When CFS became my life, I was on the road to becoming a psychotherapist, was in graduate school, and excited about having finally clarified my career path. As I drove to school from my home in Winooski, Vermont to Keene, New Hampshire something began to overtake me: a fatigue so encompassing, a fog so thick that rolling down a window, and blasting music could not penetrate it. Thus began my daily visits of symptoms, symptoms that got my attention, and symptoms that would eventually knock me off my educational path onto a path of illness, and eventually, healing.

When CFS was fully present in my life, it was so big it engulfed me and everything I did. At school, I managed to stay alert and awake with the help of daily caffeine-filled lunch breaks, fresh air, and walks. At home, it disrupted my sleep, my concentration, and my ability to wake up.

Eventually, CFS would become so invasive that it became my life and everything else I knew was altered by it. When I could no longer concentrate enough to write a two-page paper for a class in Human Sexuality, I knew I had to withdraw from school. I couldn’t study, and I could barely do the daily tasks of everyday functioning.

Suddenly my life was all about CFS and trying to make sense of something that made no sense. This began my journey as a health detective where I tried to understand what was happening to, and inside, of me.

When I left graduate school I was 28, and it was 1995. Until that point and throughout my twenties, I had followed my bliss to determine my career and create meaningful work. I always believed that I was supposed to do something meaningful, and that I was suppose to love my work. This ardent belief has never left me. Along the way, I had gone to countless schools, junior colleges, and even UC Berkeley. I had applied and been accepted into a private Humanities school and a celebrated photography school. I also had worked with passion personally creating bouquets for customers at a flower stand. And while I tried majoring in French, Geography, and Photography at university, it wasn’t until my first Psychology course that I felt I was home.

Soon, I had changed my major and was studying both psychology and photography. I was psyched about psych, and I felt passionate about my path.

Flashback three years. In 1992, between semesters at Sonoma State University, I left for an adventure to Europe to travel by backpack and venture in cathedrals, ruins, along rolling hillsides and roman baths, and in old fishing villages. I was 25 and felt excited and passionate about life. I was on my way to a career I loved and on an adventure of a lifetime. Little did I know just how much that journey would change me.

It was that year I met my soul mate. And, also that year, I met fate of another kind. The first trauma I was to experience (and there were many) masqueraded in a French youth hostel as a guest wanting to befriend me. After an attack that left me terrified and exhausted, I was determined to start fresh with some much-needed time at the beach.

I arrived at a youth hostel in the Cote d’Azur and was eager to put my fear and the shakiness of the attack behind me. While recounting my tale of horror to a friendly fellow backpacker, Linda, who I had met previously in the Swiss Alps, I was also being serendipitously watched by another backpacker who held hopes of sharing in the dialogue. Little did he know of the tale and overwhelm I was conveying. Instead, he understood that the dialogue was intimate and kept his distance until our conversation was broken by another less observant viewer.

Once the conversation went from being just Linda and I to a party of three, the intimacy was broken and more backpackers soon joined in. That’s when I met him, and he met me. Carl was from Montreal, Quebec, Canada: a French province I had always wondered about because of my own experience with French as an exchange student in High School. The group talked, and for the next few days we all hung out and traveled the cobbled streets of San Raphael together. It was a special, fun time, and Carl and I immediately hit it off. I felt I had known him for a lifetime, and he felt immediately at ease to be himself with me. And so began our travels together in Europe, and eventually in life.

Flashing forward to four years later, in 1996, CFS was now my life and I had left Vermont to return to my sunny home state of CA. I had transferred from Antioch New England Graduate School to continue my program at Antioch in Santa Barbara. I hated to leave Carl alone and without me, but I needed to get out of the dark clouds of New England that seemed to swallow every bit of vitality and life I had.

It was that year that my CFS path began. It was also the year that I planned for our wedding. With few exceptions, like that of our wedding and Carl’s proposal to me, I can barely recall the days and events of this past. My CFS-laden years remain haze-filled in memory, as they were in reality. I think that’s due, in part, to the mental fogginess inherent in CFS and its affects on memory, as well as due to the pain inherent in all the subsequent losses.

When CFS became my life, it robbed me of much of my life and left me wondering who I was and what had happened. Moreover, it left me determined to heal. When I began to visit doctors and healers to try to unravel the mystery, I encountered what so many other CFSers have before and after me: little compassion, limited knowledge, and little desire to help.

From the start, I felt very much alone in my illness, and I was. Few of my friends stayed around enough to compassionately see what had happened, and family members seemed to doubt the degree to which illness compromised me. As a result, I feltisolated physically and emotionally, a saga shared by so many with this illness.

Truthfully, I cannot remember many details of the years that left me in CFS’ grasp. But the ones I did recall I later conveyed, when words felt like one of my few friends, sharing those in CFS is a Call For Soulwork.

After Carl and I married, we moved to Quebec where we lived for one hellish year. Rarely have I regretted a choice; rarely have I had to convince myself of a direction. Typically, I would feel from the heart what I wanted and follow that. This time, I had to convince my heart to do what my husband so wanted. This time, I acted against my own inner knowing.

In 1996, a year after Carl and I married, we moved together to Quebec. That year was my second with CFS and my worst. And the pains of being so ill, were only matched by the pains of being in Quebec. At a time when Carl and I should have been celebrating and enjoying our life together; we were, instead, at odds. The worst of it was at the end of the day when Carl would return home from work and I would meet him at the train station: I was barely able to squeak out a word. By evening, my body was so devoured by fatigue that all I wanted to do was collapse into comfortable silence and sleep. Instead, I felt I had to converse, and every thought I had was overcome by distress and judgment.

The sad truth is, my greatest companions that Quebec year, were those that gave me the most constant, unconditional support, my cats: Sage and Rita. Creativity also saved me. I tried to take classes, but could barely manage the drive or muster the energy to stay focused. I explored volunteer work, but immediately felt overcome by overwhelm. And so my life was filled by the day-to-day of being at home alone with my two cats, taking care of chores and trying to take care of myself. I was desperately lonely, depressed, and exhausted. And I had become an isolated, sick housewife in an unforgiving, freezing place.

That year was the worst. I’ll never forget the times when I would brace myself in the shower, wondering how I could be so weak, so unable to do more than the basics. I could cook, clean, and get dressed, but never do anything for very long, never concentrate for more than a short while. Basic tasks like going to bank and the grocery store became the biggest events of the week, and the only time I left the home. And even these events felt overwhelming and daunting to my CFS-compromised body, mind, and emotions.

When Carl finally completed his teaching year in Quebec and was ready to apply for teaching positions in the US, I couldn’t have been more hopeful. We were getting out! In the summer of '97: we packed up our van, Sage and Rita, and our belongings and crossed the border and several states to arrive at our new home in Colorado.

This was a new beginning. I saw our new home as a chance at a new start and healing. The sun in the sky mirrored the hope in my heart. But it would take years before my CFS would begin to ease up. With all the determination in the world, I would heal. I spent the next several years doing everything I knew to heal. I saw doctors, took blood tests, tried energy healing, took classes on healing, sent away for a home study course, read books on nutrition, aromatherapy, and herbology. I drank herbal tinctures, got massages, and took homeopathic remedies. I gardened, read, and cooked. I diagrammed my health and symptoms, made connections, and drew my feelings. For years, I was at home, now a professor’s wife with little more to identify myself with. When asked what I did, I felt a deep sense of inadequacy at my lack of career, at my inability to do much more than housework and study. But all the while, I was uncovering what was happening to me. I was beginning to heal, and I was beginning to feel like I knew things about what had happened and why.

The story is complex and the healing was a lengthy, arduous process. But I did heal, and I am now realizing that this story is behind me, that CFS is history.

In some ways when I had CFS I would never have believed I would heal, and in other ways I never gave up believing that I would. Don’t believe the statistics or the prognosis. If you do, you may lose whatever power you have in healing.

My healing began the day I realized something was wrong with me, and I began doing everything I could to heal. I never gave up, and I never stopped trying to heal.

Today, tears well in my eyes when I realize what I went through and how far I’ve come. I feel great empathy for every CFSer I come in contact with, and I feel gratitude for all I learned.

Skipping forward a few years to 1999, things began to shift for me. When I took a class on healing and learned attunement, an energetic, spiritual hands-on healing art, a door to spirit opened up for me. Soon, I began waking up to an early-morning muse that would further help me see the teacher in the misery, in the illness.

While, by day I still grappled with the symptoms of fatigue, lethargy, and foggy concentration, at night, I would awaken to inspiring words that effortlessly flowed out of me. That is how I learned that CFS was a Call For Soulwork. As the words came, I wrote, and soon I had two journals full of writing that would later become my book.

Today, I no longer have CFS. I have found a new passion and career and am able to do the things I love and hold dear. When CFS derailed me from my career path a decade ago, I couldn’t see anything but the pain and loss that it was causing me. I couldn’t understand why something like this was happening.

I don’t understand every aspect of my CFS journey, but I do know that it was not just a robber of my identity and vitality. I know that CFS was truly a teacher and I am grateful for all it has taught me. I know that it has led me to where I am today and it has helped me realize my power and my own ability to heal.

Today, I am living proof that it’s possible to be very ill and have your life completely uprooted by illness only to eventually come through it and realize its many gifts. Today, my life remains blessed and permanently altered by the CFS I had. There are teachings that CFS brought that I hope I never forget. That is the power of being and the importance of balancing being and doing. I share these teachings in CFS is a Call For Soulwork.

Last year, I continued on the path of passion and Soulwork and was led to the most amazing school I have ever experienced. In June 2007, I graduated from IIN, the Institute for Integrative Nutrition. Never have I been so challenged to be all that I can be; never have I felt so embraced within a large community. Never have I had so much support from so many diverse people, and never have I heard so many healing stories about transformation and the power of good food. Without all that, I’m not sure I would be healed today. But, because of IIN, and because of opening to spirit, and because of changing diet, and because of many healers, and because of my dedication to my healing journey, today I can declare: I am healed!

Today, because of this latest education at IIN, I am happy to call myself a Nutrition, Wellness, and Holistic Health Counselor. I feel that the Call For Soulwork journey that started over a decade ago with CFS continues for me in my work and life. My counseling continues the work I did as a CFSer, only now I am a health detective for others, and I use my intuition, knowledge of healing, nutrition, food, and many healing modalities, to help others.

Today, I also continue to be in a blessed relationship with my husband, Carl, and our family of four cats. Soon, we plan to add a child to our family, and are in the process of adopting a little girl from China. Carl and I both feel passionate about healing and both work in the helping professions. We also share a passion for animals and the planet and have recently created a greener home, garden, and lifestyle. Through reduced and better energy use, a permaculture design in our yard, raised beds for veggies, a greenhouse for year-round planting of food, driving a hybrid, and walking and biking, we are living better and feeling more connected to ourselves and the planet.

Over ten years ago, CFS took over my life and became my life. Today, I see that CFS has given me a larger sense of myself and helped me define what matters most. My life is all about healing: healing people, animals, and the planet. What could be better?