Hey CFS warriors, I woke up the other morning thinking of this funny metaphor that I wanted to share with you about CFS recovery. And you know, it really has to do with, you know, the more and more I learned about neural retraining, the more I'm realizing, kind of the important overarching goal of chronic fatigue syndrome recovery is calming down the nervous system. You know, the World Health Organization classifies this as a neurological illness. And you know, like for me, the trigger was Epstein-Barr virus. And for other people, it might be an accident or a traumatic experience that locks their body into this limbic system impairment. It's like a brain injury where the mechanism has changed and now your body is creating a lot of stress hormones. It's affecting multiple systems. And so that's why it's so important in recovery to learn how to calm down the nervous system. And so it's not like emotional stress or mental stress. It is a physical, biological mechanism that's locked in place. And so that's why it can be so challenging. So many way the metaphor was kind of about a funny thing that happened to me when I was living in Maui and I was walking along the beach and I came up on this guy who was fishing on the beach and right at his feet there was this little puffer fish that was rolling around in the waves. And if you've ever seen a puffer fish, they're the cutest little fish. But what they do is when they see a predator or they're in danger, they inflate. So suddenly you have this little fish that's just gone into this big balloon. Sadly, you might have seen them in a gift shop or something like that. So anyway, this little fish was just rolling around and surf. And I asked the guy what's going on here and he said, oh, well, I caught him but I don't want it. And so he could care less, but I love puffer fish. So I picked the fish up and I threw him way out. And you know what that little puffer fish did is because he was inflated, he just bounced on the waves until they finally rolled him back in and he was back on the surf just getting kicked all around. So this went on like three or four times I did this. And so finally I picked up that little puffer fish and I said, God, please let this puffer fish know I'm just trying to help him. And that he just needs to, you know, to flay and he can go back into the ocean and back to his life. And so I just threw him way out and bam, he suddenly just dove into the water and swam off, never to be seen again by me. So anyway, I laughed because I thought, you know what, that is such a parallel to chronic fatigue syndrome. In how it doesn't matter the trigger that happened whether it was a fisherman or a shark or something on a boat that scared this little guy or locked him into this mechanism, his body blew up and he really didn't have any control over that. I don't know how he finally managed to get back in. But it's kind of like what we need to do is deflate and get back to the ocean of our lives. And so we can do this in a lot of different ways. Neural retraining is an excellent way to work to retrain the nervous system. But there are other things like watching a show that makes you laugh or sitting and having the company with someone who their presence is soothing to you or sitting out in the sun if you're not able to take a walk. So I think it's important to have a plethora of ways to calm down the nervous system. And I found it was interesting in my journey that when I was bedbound and housebound, my goal had been is I learned through the opt-in health clinic to calm down that nervous system. And once I managed that, I began to improve and I began to be able to get out of the house. But you know what then happened? Is that maladaptive stress as they call it kicked back in? So now I had to learn how to calm down the body while I was engaging with life. So some of you may have experienced this where you're okay. You don't really have symptoms anymore when you're at home after you've conquered that land in your recovery. But now you're finding it challenging to interact with the world. So that's where you kind of have to pull out all your forces and get that nervous system calm back down again. So anyway, I just want to encourage you to be like that popper fish to flay and get back to the ocean of your life because you can do this warriors.