The doctors diagnosed Christine with incurable fibromyalgia. Accepting that & their medications, she was work-disabled for 20 years. She became interested in spirituality & healing. 20 years later, on her 65th birthday, having witnessed her mother’s suffering & death with dementia, she decided she must create a new life while she still could. She focused on what she most wanted & used a spiritual 4-body healing approach. She not only healed herself but created a repeatable process to help others heal themselves, called Fibro Freedom Formula: You Healing You. Get supportive advice and learn from one who has walked in your shoes, so you can learn and be coached in peace, without any anyone telling you that you are making this up, or that fibromyalgia is incurable. The last thing you need is to be misunderstood because of this invisible illness.
Christine Lutley, FibroCoach.Online
Introduce yourself! Please tell us about you and your life, so we can get to know you better.
I am a first-born, now seventy-year-old Canadian woman, from Nova Scotia. I was blessed to have traveled in all Canadian provinces, a couple of Caribbean Islands, and to Fiji, Tahiti, and Australia 4 times, and best of all to have lived in Hawaii for 23 years. I love the ocean, mountains, beaches, and palm trees. The cold chills me. I am passionate about women’s issues. I graduated from a women’s university and spent much of my career working with women, in a hospital, as a shopping center manager, and as a women’s not-for-profit executive director. Much less exciting, I spent 20 twenty years work-disabled from fibromyalgia, depression, anxiety, and PTSD. Normally, a hard worker, people-pleaser, and over-achiever with perfection as a goal; I broke those habits while I was very ill. I learned to “just be” while enjoying the beauty of Hawaii and learning for the sake of learning. I love to learn, especially big-picture ideas that explain life and help me to make the most of it -- philosophy, spirituality, psychology, coaching, and healing. I love to share what excites me. For most of my life, I was single or divorced. I have no children. I have been a dog-mom, 6 times, and 3 of those have been with support or service dogs. The spelling of dog is no accident. Like God, dogs are love. COVID-19 made my choice to coach virtually a very ordinary decision. However, the virtual aspect of being able to work with people anywhere from my own home, and to study with anyone, anywhere, made it a comfortable way for me to re-enter the working world, after having been out of the workforce for two decades. I had become used to being at home, a private person, and withdrawn. So, it took me a little longer than I would have preferred to become as open and visible as I need to be seen by those who will most benefit from my help, but instead of focusing on the slowness of my emergence, I am delighted it has happened. Early in my career, it was easy to be visible and represent an organization. Now, I have become open and visible about my own wounds, my healing, my thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and experiences, about me, and how I can help others solve their own problems because of all that. I give myself credit for that courage and consider myself a bit of a unicorn (a huge honor, since I have long loved unicorns).
Tell us about your business. What is your business name? Who do you target as your audience? How do you help your clients?
My business is called FibroCoach.Online.
I first benefitted from coaching in my late thirties with Bob Proctor, before The Secret. I used his system to achieve my dream of living and working in Hawaii. Decades later, I studied coaching and decided I wanted to coach women like me, women with fibromyalgia or other chronic pain and fatigue conditions, to heal themselves and to create lives they love, despite their diagnosis with an incurable illness. I believe that most of us with a chronic illness like fibromyalgia have some history of trauma or abuse and that the pain and fatigue are cries for help that refuse to be hidden by medications. I am no exception.
I know the problems faced by those who have experienced lots of trauma, including childhood sexual abuse, sexual harassment, sexual assault, domestic violence, financial abuse, psychological abuse, and rape. Way too many of us have that in our history and our bodies stored it all, so of course, there are consequences. Chronic illness, including fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome, are among the consequences that add lots more complications to life. Sufferers don’t feel understood. I understand. I have done the inner work with support and learned to do inner work with others. These topics are not broadly discussed and have a lot of stigmas attached to them. Even worse than stigma, is the lack of hope felt by those who have been told their condition is incurable. No cure means no medical cure, not that we are doomed to suffer, cannot heal ourselves, and manage our lives well.
Before I can help anyone, I inspire them to believe that there is hope, that it is a mistake to accept anyone else’s limiting beliefs as our own, and that we can each learn to heal ourselves. I share my story focusing on the solutions. I am a member of my fibro groups and I share my story and my advice broadly.
In my own social media and in my programs, I focus on spirituality and our innate power to heal ourselves. I demonstrate practices I use and offer a step-by-step process that is both spiritual and practical to heal on all levels: physically, mentally, emotionally, and energetically. Simple, practical tools, repeated daily, replace old habits and cause wellness. I focus on solutions and teach others to do the same.
I keep no secrets about my history and feel no shame about anything that has happened to me. Nothing they might share shocks me, nor is insurmountable because we are spiritual beings having an earthly experience. We are powerful creators. We need to make changes, to be sure our creations become based on our own beliefs and not on unhelpful beliefs we learned elsewhere. I am extremely well-trained at helping others with that and with many healing practices and modalities.
What is your work inspired by?
My work is inspired by awe, largely of the spirituality I experienced and literally embodied while living in Hawaii.
It is very different than the more indoor life I learned from my Catholic upbringing, northern European heritage, and living in a cold Canadian climate. Spirit and life are everywhere, all the time, and my senses were all fully surrounded by them most of the time because I was able to be outdoors, in the water and on the sand, every day, without layers of clothes, feeling the breeze and the sun on my skin. I embodied the spirit and perhaps that is why I felt more at home than anywhere else. I felt in my element, surrounded by spirit. It wasn’t just in church on Sundays.
I experienced a little of that on my first trip when the plane was landing. I was in awe. The Spirit of Hawaii is literally in the land, the volcanic mountains, and the lush growth there, and in the sea. I was awed by most of what surrounded me. My senses thrived in that beautiful environment. The music and dance intrigued me. The Aloha and the strong sense of Mahalo warmed my soul and have become part of me that nothing can take away. I was referred to a spiritual healing center by a friend with fibromyalgia and I learned a 4-body healing approach from Kahu Fred Stirling, at what became the Honolulu Church of Light.
If you could change one thing about your area of focus, what would it be and why?
I would disconnect any association between the words incurable and all chronic illnesses, including fibromyalgia, chronic fatigue syndrome, and more.
People make assumptions about the word, especially when spoken by a doctor and they make more of it than it really means. Incurable means there is no medical cure, to date. It is not a prognosis, but only a current perspective on a medical diagnosis arrived at largely by exclusion. It does not mean that it isn’t possible to get better, that patients must expect to suffer from it for the rest of their lives, or that it will get worse. Yet many patients assume those to be facts and are convinced their doctors told them that. Tell us about a pivotal moment in your life that brought you to where you are today.
It was a time of dramatic incongruence in my life. My second marriage was a mistake, and my Ex became abusive. The relationship had very high highs with lots of world travel and very low lows that included physical, emotional, and financial abuse, over time. I was the Executive director of a YWCA and was, in essence, a professional feminist. Imagine becoming a victim of domestic violence and abuse while working on that issue professionally. It boggled my mind. I started having flashbacks of a nice part of a dissociated memory, playing with helium-filled balloons on the ceiling. I left my Ex twice. The second time, I left and moved 6000 miles away to Hawaii. That flashback was active for many years. After I became very ill, but a year before I was diagnosed with fibromyalgia, I was anxious and depressed, was diagnosed with PTSD, and was in therapy. It became clear that the flashbacks were from an incident of childhood sexual abuse by an adult male babysitter when I was only 4. It took 56 years of distance, being raped at age 60, and being treated with EMDR by a psychologist friend, to eventually bring the memory to where I could access it and associate it with an innocent fright that made the details of the original incident suddenly visually obvious. It became clear that the assault had been horrendous for a kid, and I was sick with measles when it happened.
That awareness finally explained why I was not happy during my first marriage to a really good man. I was broken; but I did not recognize it until abuse retraumatized me a few times. Later, watching my Mom suffer and die with dementia provided the Big Why I needed to create a new life for myself and get well. I deeply understand how our unconscious mind can hide memories from us so completely, while still attracting inappropriate behavior into our lives. Every illness I ever had could be attributed to abuse at 4. Symptoms started in my early teens. They alternately escalated and vanished, until fibromyalgia brought me to a crashing stop. Even then, with twice-a-week psychiatric support, I still couldn’t face going there. I think it is unlikely that I would have been able to heal myself if I had not finally discovered really happened to me as a little girl, or at least trusted myself enough to believe the flashbacks. I find it interesting that I was sick with measles when the childhood abuse happened because being ill was the way I got time off to distance myself from whatever was going on in my life. My mother and grandmother experienced lifetimes of illness, too. I doubt they ever got the same clarity about why, as I did. More than half of the women I surveyed about a possible connection between fibromyalgia and trauma believe there is one. I am convinced there is.
It is now clear to me that all that happened to me also happened for me, so I could reconnect to and understand my journey and my purpose. I have known what happened for 10 years now. I have written my story, spoken about it live, accepted the facts, released the previously stuck and unexpressed emotions, and mostly healed it. I am no longer chronically exhausted and full of pain. Holding onto our toxic crap, even blissfully unaware that any trauma ever happened still drains our energy, our life force, and our power, so our bodies cry out in pain for healing.
No medication can fix this. I was broken and I needed to heal myself and my wounds. I had great medical care in Hawaii and great healing support too. I give lots of credit to those who supported me through that journey. I learned a lot. I know I was blessed by breaking and by healing. I would not have had access to all that if I had not had good reason to venture far from home. Without encountering spirituality, so directly and intimately, swimming with sea turtles, recognizing sea lions on the beach, examining octopi much too closely, having manta rays use my tummy as a pool wall to turn around on, I just might have missed the sheer wonder of it all and missed the connection to all things that spirituality is.
Being well now and being able to help others to heal themselves makes life make sense. It gives me meaningful work to do. I am well enough and can be of service.
