by Julie Genser

Many new members in the Planet Thrive community have asked this question: Can brain retraining help those with lyme disease and co-infections?

My educated guess is that yes, brain retraining can help normalize limbic system function for those with active tick-born infections as well as post-lyme disease. Athough it won’t eradicate the infection directly, it may help bring your immune and detoxification systems into a more functional state, allowing your own body to keep the infection in check, or even eradicate it on its own (or with a little help from lyme herbs and/or antibiotics).

One of our members, who goes by the username “Writing Girl,” has recently posted a summary of all the ways she feels brain retraining has helped her lyme symptoms. It was so inspirational to our members that I wanted to share it with a wider audience. Here is what she posted:

I’ve found some definite beneficial effects on my lyme symptoms by doing the brain retraining. I had begun the brain retraining to help with severe MCS (chemical sensitivities), and then lo and behold, some other wonderful things started happening…

• CIRCULATION Within two days of beginning retraining, my cheeks and lips went noticeably nice and pink. That’s vascular and muscular relaxation, meaning blood flow (and lymph flow) were now working properly, and on a cellular level the body was beginning to take care of more of its business in a normal fashion.

• SLEEP Within three days I began having good sleep for the first time in years! I just started to conk out (in a good way!) with wonderful uninterrupted sleep…all night long. Previously I would wake up multiple times a night or lie there awake til 5 in the morning. Of course sleep is the time when our bodies have the opportunity to restore and heal themselves. What a great gift for my body that the brain was able to give it the chance to work on things!

• WEIRD VISION ANOMALIES IMPROVING Within two weeks I was at my optometrist’s office trying to sort out a new prescription because my eyes had begun changing dramatically. This is BIG. As background, due to the (neuro) lyme, my eyes stopped converging properly. Any time I tried to look at anything close up, I would get dizziness and nausea that would last anywhere from ten minutes to two days. I could not use “reader” magnification without vertigo. This means that I have spent the past 8 years without access to beloved printed matter (books, magazines, Christmas cards, family photographs, food labels, etc). I can read on the computer because I can make the font large there, requiring no big eye converging. The only glasses I have are very, very weak distance glasses that I have used around the house and for driving.

Now – ta-dum! – these glasses are obsolete for those purposes. My eyes have become normal for both driving and around the house, and I now use those weak glasses only for sitting at the computer. Funnily, I also was stunned when I found myself studying the details of a photograph the other day. No vertigo! NEVER would have happened before. Then the other day, for the first time in eight years, I saw for a moment the hair on my husband’s arms. I know this is complicated and quite oddball, but the bottom line to me is that my eyes are healing (my brain is finally getting the chance to heal my vision) and further down the line I’ll be able to see things really close up again without vertigo, maybe with glasses, maybe without. I can’t tell you how exciting this movement is for me. And it all began to change immediately after I began retraining. (BTW, it’s very possible this vision situation was exacerbated by mercury poisoning, so I guess brain retraining helps with that as well!)

• NEUROPATHY PAIN Throughout retraining, there has been a slow but steady reduction in neuropathy pain. When I started retraining, the burning pain was a definite and persistent negative in my life, bringing pain not only to the feet and hands, but also the back, arms, shoulders, legs, scalp and ears. This has generally become “quieter” since retraining. It has also been a reality in my life that any time my hands would touch something cool, the burning, like handling a match, would hit and then persist for a very long time (this is called thermal allodynia). That is the case for things like kitchenware, metal door handles, glass, anything in the refrigerator or outside, etc. I cannot touch them without gloves or fabric over my hands. But recently I’ve noticed I can pick up a cool plate, though briefly, without the burning. When I’ve gotten stressed out or temporarily a bit sloppy about retraining practice, the burning gets “louder”, so I know there’s a clear relationship.

• MCS This has been my scientific way to keep track: I got a bar of extremely mild cucumber soap and wrapped it up in 9 layers of dish towel fabric. I placed it on a dresser where I walk by multiple times per day. I keep track of my improvements by measuring how close I have to be to the fabric-wrapped soap before smelling it. Before brain retraining I could smell the fragrance from 5 feet away. A few weeks later I suddenly realized I wasn’t smelling it from that far. I checked again — 4 feet, nothing — 3 feet, nothing. I had to get 1 foot away to smell it. Now, 7 weeks later, I have to put my nose right on the little pile of fabric to smell the soap.

I also find I am not freaked out by my husband accidentally walking into the house with some offending car wax or whatever on his clothing. I remain calm, we deal with it smoothly, I do some “sets” and it’s over. In the past there probably would have been fear, anger, tears and hopelessness, not to mention feeling reeeallly crummy for anything from a couple of hours to a couple of days.

• BODY-WISE MILD DETOXING There are other funny little signs in my life which indicate supportive, healing changes, including the body doing its own natural detoxing (they suggest you NOT institute any detox regimens during brain retraining, but my body has been showing little signs of doing its own natural, mild detoxifying, according to its own wisdom). This is obviously very good for all of us, canaries, lymies, and more.

• BEST GIFT OF ALL I would just add that perhaps the greatest overall gift from brain retraining has been a sense of empowerment and hope. With the brain retraining tools I know I can give my body its best chance of healing. Whether it can heal the lyme in the long run, I don’t know, but at least I can get to a good solid baseline at which my body can be a much better partner with whatever lyme treatments I do down the road.

FINALLY, I BELIEVE THIS IS WHAT HAPPENS, IN A NUTSHELL: In calming down the limbic system (including the amygdala – “fight or flight” center) the brain in its wisdom is then prompted to send out the message, “Hey, the bear is no longer chasing us! If we don’t have to run away any more, then we don’t have to be instructing the body’s systems to shut down and focus only on running! OK, body, you decide what the high priority fixes are now! Heal away!”

I am beginning to think that brain retraining would be good for everyone at some level…

At the time of this report Writing Girl had been using Annie Hopper’s Dynamic Neural Retraining System™ (DNRS™) program for seven weeks. Now, at 10 weeks, she continues to see improvement, particularly in terms of her energy level, reduced MCS-related olfactory hyper-sensitivity and vision anomalies.

Writing Girl has had lyme disease most of her life but remained misdiagnosed until eight years ago when she developed neurological involvement. Since that time, due to profound hypersensitivities of all kinds and a genetic inability to detoxify, she has struggled with various lyme treatments to make healing progress. She has used no lyme treatments in quite a long time, and none leading up to or during her use of Annie Hopper’s program. Aside from the proverbial help of “time,” the DNRS program is the first experience she has had in the past eight years using any treatment which has truly begun to make a difference. She pairs the DNRS program’s protocol with her intuition in determining her gentle but definite daily practice.

Congratulations Writing Girl, this is so exciting to hear. Thank you for sharing so many details of your progress with our community, your update will surely inspire many others with lyme and co-infections to add brain retraining techniques to their own recovery program.
The Planet Thrive community has become a hot-bed of hope and inspiration, with over 250 members actively pursuing some form of brain retraining, while sharing insights from tons of reading and research on the topic, and celebrating their successes and improvements daily. To tap into this cutting edge approach to healing environmental illnesses, sign up for a membership in the Planet Thrive community today and check out these great groups:

Brain Retraining Discussion Group
Gupta Support Group
DNRS™ Support Group (Annie Hopper’s program)
Energy Medicine & Energy Psychology
Dissolving Pain with Open Focus