Forging What?!

Have you:

  • been struggling with a chronic illness and unable to make health advancements?
  • seen several doctors but can’t get a diagnosis?
  • collected many diagnoses but haven’t been satisfied with treatments?
  • been looking for a more natural approach to health and wellness?

If you answered yes to any of these questions you are not alone. In fact, 46% of global disease burden is due to chronic illness and is forecasted to increase to 57% by 2020 (WHO).

In 2007, I too found myself answering yes to all of these questions. In my lowest moment, I was completely bedridden, only leaving home to jump from doctor to doctor looking for answers. I was functioning in complete desperation, seeking out any means by which to live a normal life. After years of study, experimentation, and extremely meticulous and disciplined behaviors, I began to redefine my “struggle for normal” as my endless quest for health and happiness.  I began to choose to frame my journey as one of growth and discovery, forging my own path to wellness. I have now spent the last decade or so on this wellness journey that has taught me how to overcome the debilitating symptoms for which no single doctor had the solution. It is this path of lifelong learning that has inspired me to launch “Forging Wellness,” with the hope that in reading about my path others can find their way as well.

Before fully exploring Forging Wellness and its significance to me, let’s take a deeper look at what it means “to forge.”

Forging is:

  • A self-directed activity and often describes an approach into/through something unknown and/or scary
  • Entails periods of slow and steady progress as well as times when advancement can be made quickly and efficiently
  • Is exploratory, yet cautious, requiring full attention to the information available to us in our surroundings

I realize that before you stumbled upon this site the concept of forging was likely not one you’d use to describe your health. After all, health and wellness should be a natural state of being, right?  “Is it really something we must seek out and create for ourselves?” you might be wondering. If so, I invite you to consider what “Forging Wellness” means.

Forging Wellness is:

  • Taking ownership and control of your health journey
  • Staying the course and not giving up even when you aren’t seeing the results you would like
  • Balancing experimentation, self-discipline, and listening to your mind/body as you explore the path to your best self
  • Seeking out resources to enhance your knowledge of your own personal challenges as well as an understanding of what wellness is and means to you.  

As tempting as it may sound to just take a magic pill or embark on the next fad diet expecting all of our troubles to go away, most of us know from experience that this strategy is either short lived or completely ineffective. As we forge wellness in life we must learn, do, adapt and repeat. We must push aside those things obstructing our view and continually make adjustments to our approach in order to avoid and/or overcome obstacles that are revealed along the way. Once a particular part of our journey is “done” we can share our experience in order to help those around us. Hence the motto “Easier done; then said.”