I haven't been mailing very much in the past month because I have been ill. Bad case of pleurisy in fact which pretty much laid me up for February. I would like to be able to say that practising Stav seriously makes you impervious to illness, but sadly this isn't the case. There were a few days when I wasn't able to do the stances at all and about 3 weeks when any training was pretty much out of the question. When I could get out of bed then walking to the bottom of the garden if the weather was fine was about my limit.

So I was ill, now I am just about better, so what? Stav may not necessarily prevent illness, some sort of infection had actually been building up for a long time and my immune system coped with it until for some reason it couldn't any more. Which shows that sometimes being fit and strong just means that you can delay the inevitable but it is still going to catch up with you in the end. So if you do suspect you have a health problem get it checked out by conventional or alternative means, or even both and then sort it out, other wise when your body does crash it will be pretty devastating.

Another point, Antibiotics do mess up your system, especially the digestive system. I used to reckon I could get away with one course of Antibiotics with no real ill effects. But this time I took two courses and I was losing weight quite seriously and had no energy, a pretty clear sign I was not absorbing nutrients properly and this is hard to do when the friendly bacteria in your gut have all but been eliminated. I am now a few days into a course of strong pro-biotic capsules and I am feeling a great deal better already. Ivar has been telling people for years about the importance of looking after the micro organisms in their gut by eating a daily staple etc. Well, I now know what it is like to have to try and manage without them. After the antibiotics were finished I have been trying to complete the job using charcoal but more about that another time.

The stances help too, there were a couple of days when I couldn't actually get out of bed so doing them physically was out of the question. But apart from that I did do them as best I could. It is a bit frightening when it takes several panting breaths to do one stance. But as you come back to normal so does the performance of the stances. The galdre stances are the hardest obviously and when I can do the full Karl sequence as easily as I could before I got ill I will know I am really better.

Which leaves the issue of recovering fitness but more on that tomorrow.

Regards

Graham