How I stopped playing small and being scared

It was a Friday morning in November 2019 and I was sitting in a conference room in Ashton Gate Stadium in Bristol. I was sitting in a room with rows of chairs facing the front with about 90 other people and wondering what the hell I was about to experience for the next weekend.  I was about to attend the Landmark Forum after a couple of friends had invited me to do it for over a year. To be honest, I was there to appease them and thought that maybe I could get some help in improving my business and make more money. I was not there for any kind of breakthrough to do with MS, that is for sure.

Within the first 30 minutes our leader asked the simple question, “What future do you want to create?” and it really hit me. I knew the future that I wanted, but I had absolutely no belief that I would ever achieve it because now I had MS. During the 4 years since I had been diagnosed, doubt and fear had slowly crept into my life and wrapped themselves around my future like an ivy slowly suffocating my ambitions and I hadn’t even noticed. I had gone from thinking that everything was possible for me in life to living a small life governed by fear about making my MS worse. When my leader Michelle asked that question, I put my hand up and shared that I wanted to run a successful business, but that I didn’t think it was possible because I had MS. I also burst into tears. She said that by the end of the weekend I would have “disappeared” my MS. As I continued to sob at the realisation of what I had lost, I agreed to commit to fully participating in the coaching course for the weekend. However, the possibility of “disappearing my MS” didn’t seem realistic and I didn’t really believe that she understood the physical challenges that MS presents and that they aren’t something that you can just “disappear”. However, I was willing to give it a go.

It is very hard to describe what actually happens during the Landmark Forum. It sounds so simple and straightforward...your leader shares distinctions, you share your experiences and thoughts and feelings and over the course of 3 days, people have epiphanies and breakthroughs in every aspect of their lives. The experience is different for every person as we are all dealing with our own issues, but there are common themes that appear in terms of improved confidence, freedom of self expression, healing of broken relationships etc.

My big breakthrough that completely changed my life happened on the Saturday night. We did an activity which involved facing your fear. We all closed our eyes for what must have been over an hour. We imagined our biggest fear and were invited to fully feel it. We could shout and scream and get physically present to it (weird, I know, but it worked!). I suddenly saw a wheelchair and I was absolutely petrified of it. For me, the wheelchair was potentially the end game of having MS. It was the worst reality that I could imagine and not only that, but I believed that if I was in a wheelchair my fiancé Jon would stop loving me. Through doing this exercise and after having been in the Forum for 2 days, I realised that I don’t need to be scared of the wheelchair. I don’t need to be scared of it, because I am completely in control of how I respond to everything that happens in my life. A wheelchair is just a wheelchair. I had made it mean so many other things: that it would ruin my life; that no one would love me; that I wouldn’t be able to enjoy my life.  The fear of ending up in a wheelchair had made me play small and live my life in an ever smaller bubble. I didn’t push myself while at work and would stop working and give in to even the slightest flare of my symptoms because of the fear of my MS getting worse. I had developed a real paranoia and obsession about getting enough sleep and had got addicted to a sleep app that told me if I’d had a “good sleep”. Even if I felt like I’d slept well, if the app said it wasn’t good quality, I created the reality that my day wasn’t going to go well and that I didn’t have enough energy instead of actually listening to my body. It was a vicious circle. On the final night of the Landmark Forum, I stood up in front of all the participants, as well as my entire family, and shared my breakthrough. It meant the world to me when my Dad said that he knew I was smart, but he hadn’t known how brave I was. I felt so powerful and I took this power with me into doing the next course in the series in London.

The Advanced Course focuses on the idea that we are all a big body of concerns that run our lives. E.g. I’m scared of what people think of me, I’m tired, I’m hungry, this isn’t fair and it is these thoughts that dictate how we live. The Advance Course aims to have everyone work outside of their body of concerns by working at the level of the group. This involves being responsible not just for yourself and your success in the course, but that of everyone else who is participating too.  Again, it sounds so simple, but for me this weekend reinforced my ability to be more than my MS and to be more than my symptoms. The course days are really long: 10am - 10pm for 3 days, plus a Tuesday evening. However, I was so inspired by working as part of a group and being responsible for everyone, not just myself, that I really didn’t experience symptoms during the entire weekend. I wasn’t tired, I didn’t notice any hunger, or if I did, it wasn’t a reason to disengage with what we were doing as part of the course. 

They say that how you do the courses is how you do life and I realised that if I’d been able to focus and be engaged for that long on approximately 5 hours sleep each night and not give in to my symptoms, then I could do that in my daily life too. I could stop playing small. That is not to say that I don’t listen to my body and give it what it needs (mainly sleep or meditation!), but it does mean that I don’t give in to every little twinge when it arises. This is possible because I am no longer scared of making those little twinges mean terrible and scary things. I also know that I can take action in spite of having MS symptoms, especially when I have a clear intention and mission in life that is more important than my own body of concerns. Participating in the Landmark Forum and subsequent seminars is also why this blog exists. I came full circle in the grieving process and had reached “acceptance”, but I still wasn’t connected with the MS community. During the Advanced Course I created the possibility of being power, love and inspiration. So, I let go of all of my worries about my MS “not being bad enough to write about” and decided to just write about my experience.

My hope is that if even one person finds what I write useful in some way, then I will be happy, so please do let me know what you think about the blog in the comments! Also, if you would like to find out more about the Landmark Forum, you can visit their website: https://www.landmarkworldwide.com or drop me an email using the contact form.