How Marilyn Beat 30 Years of CFS: Now Feeling Superb at 70!
Marilyn Lemmon is back to skiing and hiking after overcoming 30 years of ME/CFS.
In her late thirties, Marilyn Lemmon was an avid backpacker, bicyclist, skier and hiker. The Mount Shasta, California woman was also pursuing her dream to be a scientist. But a flurry of life stressors hit Marilyn unexpectedly, and her health tumbled down like an avalanche.
“I was fine one day and not the next,” Marilyn recalls. She experienced a quintessential crash into chronic fatigue syndrome, or ME/CFS. Over the next 30 years, her carefully-laid plans got buried in a blanket of malaise.
Marilyn went to a slew of doctors, including two CFS specialists, along with acupuncturists, homeopaths and ayurvedic practitioners. She tried treatments for Epstein-Barr Virus and toted around 20 bottles of supplements, to no avail.
“I watched my exercise, which I loved so much, slip away,” says Marilyn. “I’m lucky that I’ve never been housebound but I’ve gotten close to that in these 30 years. It was profoundly frustrating and the doctors couldn’t help me at all.”
After a while, she gave up on a medical maze that didn’t understand her. Post-exertional malaise became her regular companion. She had to drop out of graduate school and forego outdoor adventures, her most passionate pursuits.
There were crashes and bouts of depression. Mostly, Marilyn resigned herself to this seemingly incurable condition. She tried to make the most of her situation by taking up nature photography, a fulfilling escape when she felt up to it.
WATCH MARILYN’S VIDEO TO LEARN:
Why Marilyn made quick progress after 30 years of ME/CFS
What key practices fueled her recovery
How mind-body healing helped her overcome PEM and crashes
From modern medicine to the mind-body connection
At one point, Marilyn had a short-lived remission of symptoms during a vacation. This furthered her belief in the mind-body connection. But she didn’t know how to harness it for a lasting recovery.
One day, after three decades of living under a blanket of fatigue, she tried another search.
“I was getting worse again, and was really frustrated by it,” Marilyn recalls. “I woke up one morning in the middle of a crash and the depression that goes with it. I did a search on ME/CFS and ‘mind-body’ and came up with an interview with you [Rebecca Tolin]. I was like ‘this is what I’m looking for.’ I had no idea it was out there. I was completely thrilled!”
Although she had doubts, Marilyn decided to follow her hunch about mind-body healing and enrolled in the Be Your Own Medicine course. After just 10 days of study and practice, there was a small but perceptible shift: instead of feeling exhausted at the end of the day, she felt good like she used to as an avid cyclist.
Through her studies, Marilyn came to believe her symptoms were neuroplastic, generated by her unconscoius brain and nervous system. This means they’re malleable and responsive to beliefs, behaviors and a felt sense of safety. She practiced daily somatic meditations and breath work to regulate her nervous system. Sometimes, during a meditation, she felt flooded with good-feeling hormones.
Within the first few months, Marilyn increased her activity to retrain her brain and reclaim her life. At first, she meandered to the mailbox. Then, down the road.
”I was making it to the neighbor's driveway and back, and these are fairly good sized lots here,” recalls Marilyn. “That was pretty amazing. It was this slow, steady improvement with the tools for dealing with the symptoms. I would get up the next day, have a little bit of symptoms, and just go to the grocery store, the dentist, or whatever, without worrying about it.”
Marilyn’s confidence and step count grew. She was elated to start hiking again! All the while, she used tools like somatic tracking, graded exposure and other emotions-based meditations.
Back to mountain trails after 30 years
After a few more months, Marilyn decided to take a hiking expedition to the Canadian Rockies with her husband—something she’d yearned to do for years.
“We did this amazing hike in Marble Canyon,” says Marilyn. “I'm on Cloud 9 because I've got my little backpack on, and I'm hiking up this trail, and it's been so freaking long since I've done this!”
Marilyn recalls a sense of bliss washing over her. Being on a mountain trail is her favorite place in the world—and she’d finally made it back!
After this watershed moment, Marilyn kept expanding her walks back home in Mount Shasta. At one point, she developed stiffness in her hip joint. She figured it might be old age, but decided to try the short, portable physiological sigh along the way.
“I did it the entire half-an-hour walk,” Marilyn says. “I got back to the car, feeling absolutely euphoric! I always felt good after the walks, but this was crazy euphoric, and that solved the problem suddenly. I was walking every day, and I wasn't getting that stiffness anymore.”
Since then, Marilyn has returned to skiing at age 70, feeling better now than she has in decades!
“I have a nice feeling of ‘this is your life,” says Marilyn. “Go out and live it!”
The secrets to her recovery? A diverse toolkit to navigate flare-ups that came during her recovery period and the normal life stressors since then. Besides somatic and emotions-based meditations, she uses Expressive Writing to offload everything from daily annoyances to long-standing griefs about her 30-year odyssey with CFS.
She can never regain those years, or missed life experiences, but Marilyn is determined to make the most of her life now. By way of contrast, she appreciates her nature expeditions more than ever.
“It's incredible. I never really thought I would get here. I hadn't a clue that these techniques were out there. So to find them and then find that they worked was a dream come true!”
Keen to try a somatic meditation like the one Marilyn used to recover? Sign up for a free meditation here!
Want to learn more about Marilyn’s experience in Be Your Own Medicine?