| Hi Friend,
I am wondering how much you let yourself hope that things can and will get better for you because hope can be a scary word when you have chronic illness.
It's usually the "what ifs" that tend to run constantly through your mind about all the ways that things could get worse and all the things that could go wrong.
The kind of things that keep you awake at night or that you think about at 3am on those long, dark, nights of the soul when everything feels so overwhelming.
So many of my clients confess to me that they are just too scared to have any hope because what if they allowed themselves to hope and they were wrong?
What if there is nothing that will work, nothing that will help and all that hope was just a big waste of time and money and energy?
Well, here is why I choose to believe in hope.
Hope makes me feel better, better in myself and better in my life.
Hope reminds me that there are miracles that happen every day if we just open our eyes to them.
Hope puts a smile on my face and helps me look at the possibilities that are available to me right now.
Hope opens things up and give me a feeling of choice and reminds me that how I choose to see myself and my situation right now is completely up to me.
Four years ago I was at the lowest point in my 59 years of life. It felt like everything that made me "me" had been taken away from me.
I didn't know if I would live or die and if I did live, what sort of life I would be able to have and what level of disability I would experience.
I felt hopeless.
Completely hopeless, lost and alone.
Chronic autoimmune illness was too overwhelming to even begin to comprehend, especially with brain fog that made remembering even simple things almost impossible.
I had to find my hope again.
I started researching and listening to people like Dr. Terry Wahls and her Youtube talk called "Minding your Mitochondria" and see just how far she had come back from progressive MS.
I read stories of how people had used lifestyle interventions to help themselves heal, not cure themselves but reverse symptoms and disabilities.
I banded together with others online who were using this weird natural thyroid hormone replacement called "Natural Desiccated thyroid" or NDT for short and learned how to use it after searching for a Doctor who would prescribe it.
Most of all, I held onto hope that if others could make such a big difference to their health and life, that I could do it too.
Bit by bit.
Little by little.
With no idea what was possible for me.
If I had not have tried, if I had not had hoped, I wouldn't be here now, writing you this email.
One thing was certain, no one else was going to help me but me and hope kept whispering "keep going, you can do this" when I despaired that all of my changes were making no difference at all.
Hope reminded me that if I had been able to do everything I have done so far in my life before chronic illness, with a lifetime of disordered eating, years of smoking, drinking and being incredibly unkind to my body, then what could my body do if I actually looked after it and appreciated it and made sure that it was well nourished and rested and respected?
The possibilities were limitless.
Friend I want to invite you to find your hope again.
To embrace it and let it lift you up and let it make you feel that there is something worth fighting for.
That there are better days coming your way.
I know that hope can be such a scary thing.
On my first really good day post illness, I spent most of it anxious and crying because of the fear that this one day was all I was going to get and after having a day of feeling "almost normal", how could I possibly bear the pain of slipping back down into relapse again.
I was given the gift of a great day and I let my fear, my distrust of hope, almost ruin it for me.
I made a promise to myself that I would never do that again.
Here is the thing Friend, none of us really know what life holds for us or what our future will bring.
Life is only moments.
Good ones, great ones, beautiful ones and horrible ones.
Let's make the most of the moments we have by embracing the hope that things can still be good and life can still be worth living and give yourself permission to enjoy what you can.
Give yourself permission to hope.
The only way that you will know or not if something will work for you is to actually try it and see what happens.
What we do know about chronic illness is that it is unique and different for everyone, that this is all a brand new frontier and that it is going to take trial and error to work out what works best for you.
Trying something new and different always creates fear because we all fear change. We all fear the unknown and uncertain.
I have so many people who say to me "what if your program doesn't work for me? What if I can't be hypnotised?" and they let the fear that it wont work for them, get in the way of getting the happiness, peace and confidence they want.
The biggest risk in life is not to take any risks at all because without risk, you will never have anything or be anything or experience anything.
Having hope can feel like such a big risk but what if it ends up being the best thing you have ever done in your life?
What if it puts you back in control?
What if you feel so much better about who you are and how you live and what if your relationships get better than they ever have before?
What if you can feel better?
If nothing else, there is one thing I can tell you for certain: Having hope feels so much better than being stuck in despair, depression and anxiety.
I hope you will choose to have hope Friend.
Warm wishes and big hugs
Kerry | 
