Perioral dermatitis

I saw someone yesterday with perioral dermatitis and it reminded me that I am overdue a blog on this, because when I was trying to research it, I found it extremely helpful to read what others had written about their experience.

My skin started showing my stress a month after I returned to work when Elijah was just four months old. I was involved in the set up of a new peer-to-peer channel Island based company as well as on catch up from my three months maternity from a wealth management company, plus teaching yoga and Reiki and managing a four month old and all the demands of expressing and breastfeeding and adjusting to the relationships changes that motherhood brings. I was stressed and this manifested in sore red skin either side of my mouth, that sometimes improved, and sometimes got worse.

It carried on for a few years, until I went through IVF for Eben. I thought that maybe it was hormonal, because of the drugs I was having to take, but I finally realised that it was due to the fact I prioritised reducing my stress levels and basically retreated from the world for a few months. This highlighted to me the effect of stress on the body.

Needless to say the skin condition returned again, a few months after having Eben and gradually got worse to the extent that when Elijah was four months into reception at school and Eben was by then one, it covered the skin around my mouth and nose. It was red and angry, which fairly much reflected how I felt at the time. Elijah was not enjoying school and every drop off was heart-wrenching. I was angry about the constant rushing, of attempting to find parking for the school run, of putting my child into a system that he clearly didn’t fit into and managing all the other demands that a working life with young children required.

Everything I read on the subject suggested that red skin conditions (at that time undiagnosed) were very difficult to heal, that they were generally aggravated by stress and diet and often highlighted a lack of love for self. I wasn’t sure what to do with this, it’s not like taking a tablet and applying a cream and it’ll all be better soon. I realise now though, that it was all part of the journey to greater self-love and another opportunity to do the deeper work that needed to be done to align me more fully with my truth and with Self, which is of course an ongoing process even now.

Initially I leaned into Ayurveda. I knew the skin condition by its very nature was indicative of a pitta disorder and that this would be aggravated by stress and certain heating foods, and while I could certainly make changes to how I was living and eating (albeit I was following an Ayurvedic diet as much as I could), there was little I felt I could do to ease the emotional stress in my life. If I could have whipped Elijah out of school then and there, perhaps it would have improved quicker. But it wasn’t just that, I had a lot of unresolved emotional stress eating away inside me, experiences I hadn’t properly digested from my past and parts of myself that I was continuously rejecting, and his experience at school and my feelings around loss of safety and helplessness were merely triggered that.

I went to the UK for a pancha karma at the Ayurvedic Clinic where my Ayurvedic doctor is based. This began a process that caused me to return home and basically write every night for a month, all that had been sat undigested in my solar plexus, causing inner stress. These writings have since become From Darkness Comes Light, my current manuscript that is in its final stages of edit and which helped me to make sense of various patterns in my life and therefore the underlying themes that I allowed to play out because of fear around safety and helplessness essentially. These patterns fed stress and depressions especially and the manuscript focuses on the moments that led to depression and the ways I found my way back to the light again.

However, when my mum read an initial draft of the manuscript she commented as kindly as she could, that she didn’t believe I had really dealt with some of the issues I talked about in the book such as eating disorder. This caused me to deepen my healing and I ended up doing EMDR with a local eating disorder specialist, which was life changing, and I have been a big fan of EMDR ever since. I also set the manuscript aside feeling that i might not return to it, but of course it was all part of the experience and I did return to it, it was literally calling to me, however difficult it was to re-write!

I also signed up to study Ayurveda and while this probably promoted my stress levels in the end, highlighting how much I stress myself out with my need to further myself and achieve, it was also life changing and enabled me to practice as an Ayurvedic nutrition and lifestyle consultant, sharing my love for Ayurveda. It’s a conscious approach to healing and it became increasingly apparent that my skin condition was not only about unresolved emotional issues, but about self-love too. Those blog posts were right!

It’s difficult to say what came first, but the universe certainly supported the journey. There was a shift in yoga, to a deeper approach to practice, one of true embodiment and coming to know more of the self and the Self. This was a huge shift for me and I realised how much my old vinyasa practice was keeping me stuck, helping me to avoid those dark and uncomfortable places where I didn’t like myself very much. It was very easy to get on my mat and move my body attached to the outcome and shape of poses and not go deeper.

Thus while it made my body more flexible and stronger, it merely reinforced existing movement patterns, which fed my conditioned mental patterns. I realised too how much I was harming my body with all the pushing and pulling, of all the forcing into postures for the sake of the glory of the pose and how little I was truly respecting its sacredness. I also realised how much I was able to bypass the body at times. And while my mind was always steadied by a practice, it was not long-lasting and my same neurosis and patterns soon returned.

I became increasingly aware how much I was trained. My body was trained to be a certain way. It wasn’t allowed its own essence. My feet were either pointed or flexed, there was no softness or wisdom that was allowed expression in this. I realised too how much my mind had been trained to think and see life a certain way. We are all victim of this, taught by our parents, educators, society how to think and feel, how to be in the world, whether this suits our constitution and soul or not. We are all trained to be uniform.

This practice allowed me to break free. It centred on freeing the spine, the energy system and in the process it freed the mind in an eternal way. It wasn’t that it gave my mind more space, although it did do this so that I might more easily settle into meditation, but it freed my mind from all its conditioning and so I started to relate to myself and the world differently. This wasn’t always easy, I had to face my ego and it’s fear of being annihilated and so there was a battle of sorts where I had to find the strength to surrender that which was no longer helpful in my life to allow more self-love and soul expression in the process.

There were other things. i explored western nutrition with the wonderful Carol Champion and while the nutritional side was interesting, I am an Ayurvedic devotee and as it turned out, Carol became more of a life coach for me, and a really amazing educator on boundaries and working with other people privately in a way that does not drain, which was my pattern previously. I learned a lot from Carol, she has been instrumental on my journey to allowing more of my Self in this world in a healthier way.

I’ve been seeing Jo de Diepold Braham for shadow work for about 7 years now, I always say that it is CPD for the soul, but I threw myself into nine months of SHEN with Jo Henton, to get even deeper into the emotional body and release the fragments that still remained, supported of course by Reiki. This I did while returning to my manuscript that I had set aside for a few years - this is how long this process took! It was interesting process, because whatever I was editing in my manuscript that was unresolved, popped up in the sessions with Jo and I would go through a few weeks of processing. I felt truly supported by the universe, books, people and other material entered my life at just the right time.

It’s tough though, all this inner work and there have been times when I have questioned whether I can continue. But I know that there really is no choice, for me at least. That I have never wanted to live a life half lived, or a life without heart and soul at the centre of it. It is not enough to talk about these things either, it has to be embodied. If there is one thing I have noticed over recent years is the number of people doing the talk and not the walk, spirituality, like yoga, has become trendy, but whether people are really embodying the teachings is another matter entirely.

My skin condition also found me getting my hands in the earth. The first lockdown and Fiona offering medicinal herb seeds she had collected for free on Facebook led to me throwing myself into growing medicinal herbs and I have not looked back since. Inevitably, in my usual over-enthusiastic way - I ended up growing herbs on a scale that was indeed stressful, at least when it came to cultivating and processing into teas and tinctures etc. but I am someone that has a tendency towards putting myself under pressure - a very pitta trait, putting myself under pressure and pitta affecting the skin.

But this led me back to nature in a way I had not anticipated and this particular part of my journey is still unfolding and taking me into a new stage in my life, of being outside and working with the earth. It allowed me to bring together my love of dowsing, the moon, sacred landscape and the way in which we can create magic in our lives. My love of standing stones and dolmens has escalated and this in itself helped my healing and changed my life in immeasurable ways.

I immersed myself deeper in my menstrual cycle in the process and the wisdom of my womb and am so excited to be slowly sharing more of this with some of you through our various womb offerings. This of course took me deeper into heart, there is a connection between the two - are we living the life that our soul came here to experience? Are we in alignment with our truth? This isn’t about achieving, that I have realised, it is about just being more of who we are without caring what anyone else thinks and/or without worrying about whether that is acceptable within society. The soul is beyond all the limitations of our mind and the collective mind of society.

I looked more honestly at my numbing techniques and how I might distract myself from the moment. I started Transcendental meditation just before the first lockdown and try to do 30 minutes of this each day even now. I went sober for six months as an enquiry into alcohol. I knew that it aggravated my skin but there were times when I still indulged in a couple of glasses of sparkling wine. It was a really helpful experiment as it helped me to see my triggers and the way that I associated drinking wine with say, going on holiday, or on Fridays after an especially busy week. Gradually my interest in alcohol has waned and I don’t drink nowadays, I do still eat dark chocolate though, another pitta tendency (pitta people have a tendency towards red wine, not that I have drunk red wine for an awfully long time).

Throughout all this my skin became my way of measuring where I was at. There is a pitta element related to stress (the fire) and if life is especially stressful then my skin will play up and I’ll know that I need to reign things in a little (cool the fire). My skin will always get worse if I eat certain foods that aggravate my digestive system so I have learned to be more conscious of what I am eating and the reason for it, avoiding trigger foods if I can. I am aware that my skin is likely to be a little red in the pre-menstrual stage, a few days before my period as pitta levels raise. If there is stuff that I have not resolved within the month than it may be worse than in other cycles.

Elijah leaving school calmed things enormously. I was very aware that the skin condition was partly about the rage I felt at going against my inherent wisdom as a mother and putting my child into an environment in which he was not thriving. This was emotionally destabilising and the relief I felt when my other family members finally recognised what I had been trying to say all those years, was indescribable. Not that having him at home is not without stress, but this is more one of trying to ft everything into a day and really I thrive on my time spent with him and the other children out in nature especially.

Throughout all this I have learned to love myself more. To realise how much I was measuring myself against my ridiculous ideas of perfection fed by society and the various messages constantly brain washing me from media and systems of authority. Coming off Facebook and stepping away from other forms of media, especially the BBC online news page has been helpful. I haven’t watched TV for many years but have noticed how I have even stepped away from watching films, partly because I can’t sit down for long enough but also because I’d rather be watching a documentary on standing stones, something that doesn’t feed patterns of comparison.

I did go to the doctor at one point, in despair one day, which was a defining moment for me, because it reminded me that the allopathic approach to healing, while helpful to others, simply disempowers me. My doctor is very kind though, she offered me a pharmaceutical cream but she knew I wouldn't use it, and I took from the appointment confirmation of diagnosis. I researched the condition at length. There was no one cure. It was terribly depressing at the time. But I see now how much it has been helpful and continues to be helpful because there are still moments when it returns, when I’ve overdone it, eaten unhelpful foods and am not processing some emotional trigger in my life.

It’s a journey. If you are navigating perioral dermititis too, or any other skin condion for that matter, then you have my sympathy. It is not easy! It’s the latest organ of the body, our barrier between our inner world an outer world, and with a link to the heart. If you can, see it as an opportunity to deepen your connection to Self and to love in a deeper way, not least yourself but others too - that’s the thing with the heart, the more we open to it, the more love we have to give, and the more we open to receive, however difficult this may be.

We also learn better boundaries, because this is inherently tied into how we value ourselves and how much we are prepared to give of ourselves. This in itself is an empowering experience. We also let go of the conditioned need to achieve as proof of our worth, of letting go of titles and the various other ways that we both limit and define ourselves, making ourselves ‘known’ in the world, again often playing out a pattern about needing to be recognised for worth external to us. When we have found our centre and value our self then we don’t need that validation from others, we are quite literally enough.

Really it’s about becoming more conscious, of clearing all that needs to be let go, that keeps us tied to the past, that stresses us because of the emotional resonance that gets triggered in our day to day life - once those experiences are properly processed and digested, accepted, so that we stop rejecting parts of ourself, then we will no longer be triggered and the inner stress drops away.

It takes us to more intimate levels of being and will strengthen our trust in the support of spirit and in the sacredness of life and ourselves too - it will help us to reveal more of our own true nature and take us back to nature too. That’s the greatest gift it gives and if it can reframed into a blessing rather than a burden then this helps enormously too.

If I can help in any way then do let me know, but really we know what to do. And that might involve yoga, Reiki and Ayurveda and it may not. It helps though if we can commit to one path for some time, adopting a more dedicated approach to healing, allowing space for integration too. The cherry pick approach is unlikely to work, simply because it means we never truly allow ourselves to go deeper down one path. But at the end of the day, the more we open to soul, the more we find our way that truly transforms us and changes things and makes life infinitely richer, albeit not without its challenges!