When you do a jigsaw, how do you start? If you want to make it easy on yourself you probably start with the edge pieces or better still the corners. Once you've put the corners in place you do the edges and only then move onto the middle pieces. Otherwise the jigsaw just looks like one big jumble and it's really difficult to know where to start.

Recovery from ME/CFS is very much like doing a jigsaw. You may have tried many different things; some of them may have helped and some of them probably didn't. So if you want to put a successful recovery plan in place you need to start with the corners. And the corners of the ME recovery jigsaw are pacing, rest, relaxation and meditation.

Once you have the corners in place, you need to think about the edge pieces. Here we are looking at things like nutrition, lymphatic health, movement, and mental/emotional health. Obviously as a former Perrin Technique practitioner you will expect me to include the Perrin Technique, and you would be right. The Perrin Technique gets your lymphatics working better and supports lymphatic drainage from the brain. There is more on this in another post.

So before you start worrying about the rest of it, make sure you've got your corners and your edge pieces in place. It's also worth thinking about who can support you in your recovery and which piece of the jigsaw they are best equipped to help you with. This is not something you want to do alone, but it is important to know who you can rely on and what you can rely on them for.

The Toolbox starts with the four corners and then moves onto what you might use as edge pieces.