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Natalie Sayre Shares Her Experience Living With Chronic Illness And Barre3’s Role In Her Healing Journey
Meet Natalie Sayre, creator behind the blog, Mindful Migraine. In her writing and content, Natalie shares a voice that communicates a grounded presence, helping her readers feel instantly at ease. Her posts and reflections are deeply personal, exploring her journey living with chronic pain, but her writing conveys an important truth for anyone living with a chronic condition: When we share and connect with our communities, we can find gratitude, hope, and purpose in our lives.
Below, Natalie reflects on embracing vulnerability and building a mindfulness practice that supports her each day, and she shares why barre3 10-minute workouts are at the top of her joy list. Dive into this inspiring interview and get ready to take on any challenge with kindness, understanding, and love for yourself.
B3 MAG: Can you start by sharing a bit about your journey living with chronic illness?
NATALIE: For most of my early life and teenage years I was really healthy, but when I started my freshman year of college, I began to experience migraines for the first time in my life. They were painful and scary, but because I have a family history of migraines, they weren’t alarming.
But over the next four years, the frequency and severity of my migraine attacks increased dramatically. They went from happening every few months to lasting an entire day for multiple days in a row. It was extremely challenging. The migraines became a really big problem that I had to navigate while still trying to do all the things that I had come to expect my body to be able to do.
As someone who has always been highly motivated, a go-getter, and an honor roll student, I became consumed with trying to push through the pain and continue to show up at my best. It wasn’t until my health issues escalated to the point that I was forced to stop everything that I was able to look back and reflect on how difficult that was. At the time, I thought I was doing pretty well, but in hindsight, it’s clear how much I was struggling and how hard I was trying to work around the difficulties that each day presented.
B3 MAG: When did you start blogging about your chronic illness?
NATALIE: When I graduated from college, I moved back to California near my family and decided that I would get my health back on track that summer and start my post-grad life. Of course, it didn’t go according to plan, and in fact, that was just the beginning of what has been a really long journey.
I began working my first full-time job that fall, but within 6 months, my health was crumbling. My doctors told me I needed to stop working—I was grinding myself into the ground and going to the emergency room every other week. I had reached a point where I couldn’t push any longer, and it felt like I wasn’t even really living much of a life. I would go to work and once I got home I would immediately medicate and lie in bed until the next day when I would try to do it all over again.
I started my Instagram account, Mindful Migraine, after a year of not being able to work. I was putting all of my effort into my health, working with different doctors and trying different treatments. That year was so scary and felt like such a low point that I started to seek support online.
I was shocked to find that there were actually people my age who were talking about this online. That was huge, because I had felt like the only person in their twenties who wasn’t doing what you expect to do when you graduate. All my friends, college classmates, and peers were in their first jobs, getting their first apartments, and doing all the “normal” things that you do after you graduate.
I was embarrassed to share how much of a failure I felt like, and it took a lot for me to build up the confidence to share what I was going through. But finding my voice, discovering this community, and being able to help others has been the biggest silver lining of so much pain and struggle. It’s become one of the greatest gifts in my life.
B3 MAG: How has your barre3 practice supported you in your healing journey?
NATALIE: Because I’m fatigued all the time and because exercise is actually a trigger for me and for many people who experience migraine pain, fitness has been really difficult. It’s a delicate dance between knowing that exercise is good for me but not wanting to create more pain for myself.
In college, there was a barre3 studio close to my campus. I had been a handful of times and always loved it. I saw every client receiving full permission to do their own thing. There was an accepting energy and attitude that I loved, and in the back of my mind, barre3 was always something that I wanted to do whenever I could.
After I graduated, there was another studio near where I was living at the time. I must have walked by the studio enough times that I went to the website and found the online program. From there, it didn’t take much convincing. I jumped into the free trial and loved it. The way the workouts were organized made it easy for me to find a workout that gave me exactly what I needed on any given day. Barre3 online became a readily accessible way for me to reintroduce movement into my life that made me feel so good. The program gave me the freedom to jump back into exercise.
The 10-minute classes have really been my saving grace. Where I am physically, ten minutes is my limit. I’m pretty maxed out after those workouts, but I feel great. I feel strong and proud that I’ve completed a workout class. I never find myself thinking, Oh, I only did 10 minutes. Instead, I remind myself that I pulled up a class, pressed play, and did it from start to finish. That’s amazing, and it’s enough.
B3 MAG: You write that you’ve explored how mindfulness can help you shift your experience of your pain and chronic illness—could you dive deeper into that?
For me, coming to mindfulness and meditation was more of a weary surrender than a big embrace. In the beginning, I was so demoralized by the amount of pain that I was in and the way it felt like my life was slipping through my fingers. Emotionally, it was incredibly difficult, but after years of expecting that the next year I would be better and my life would get back on track, I realized that if I couldn’t change what was happening to me, I had to change how I responded to it. Mindfulness became my entry point for experiencing peace.
It took a long time though for me to benefit from the practice. I meditated for the first time for 30 days in a row using the Calm app, and honestly, I thought it was the most pointless thing in the world. But I had heard enough podcasts and read enough books to know that mindfulness could improve chronic pain, so I committed myself to it. It was really just this dogged determination to figure out mindfulness that ultimately helped me build my practice.
B3 MAG: How do you respond when a migraine comes on?
NATALIE: I’m really sensitive to light, noise, stimuli, and activity in general. Usually, if the pain becomes really severe, I have to go up to my bedroom and pull the blackout curtains closed. Sometimes, I’ll listen to an audiobook or a podcast to distract myself, but at times even that can be too much.
For me, meditation has been the second most helpful thing to medication. When I’m inside of pain that I feel like I can’t handle, meditation has taught me how to watch the fear, the frustration, and the sadness, and to know that these difficult emotions are not permanent. I’ll try to coach myself through the pain and my emotions with as much grace as I can. If I need to, I’ll cry and break down, but I also know how to pick myself back up much better than I used to. I remind myself that this moment of pain and challenge can’t last forever. All storms eventually pass—even if they take a long time to do so.
What’s important to note though, is that as wonderful as mindfulness and emotional intelligence can be, they’re not numbing agents. They don’t mean that you won’t feel or experience hard things. They’re tools I use to help me realize that I can be gentle and non-judgmental when I’m discouraged. It’s still going to feel uncomfortable. That realization was huge for me—to know that even if I am being mindful, these are still hard emotions that I just have to let myself feel.
B3 MAG: When faced with chronic illness, it’s easy to let our challenges define us. How have you learned to see and understand yourself beyond the challenges you face?
NATALIE: The challenges and difficulties you carry through life inevitably shape the person you become, the things that are important to you, and the way you move through the world. But I’ve come to understand that just because it’s shaped who I am, it doesn’t need to define who I am. When I had to take a medical leave from work, I lost the identity I had shaped of being a good student, a hard worker, and a committed employee. I felt lost without that understanding of myself.
It took awhile for me to understand that there were a lot of things that didn’t have to do with my work or my health that determined who I was. A lot of my values—being a good sister, a good partner, someone who is caring and grateful—all these things have nothing to do with my illness or my productivity but are a part of who I want to be in the world. They’re what I still focus on today and they continue to guide me in whatever direction I go.
It’s been a long journey getting to this place. I used to hate and focus on the fact that this had happened to me, but I can’t hate it anymore because of where it’s brought me. It’s interesting to find peace with something that’s been so difficult. I realize now that I wouldn’t be who I am and I wouldn’t be this grateful if I hadn’t pushed myself to find gratitude inside of struggle.
B3 MAG: With extended time spent at home and many external stressors entering our daily lives, 2020 has been a challenging year for so many reasons. What have you been doing during this time to help you manage that stress and stay well?
NATALIE: A lot of the tools that I’ve used to cope with chronic illness are highly-transferable to coping with COVID-19 and many of the other challenges this year has brought. What I tell everyone is that the most important place to start and where I’ve started myself is with self-compassion and kindness. There’s no way to get through something hard if you’re being hard on yourself. It doesn’t mean giving yourself total leeway to indulge in self-destructive patterns, but if you’re starting the day with negative self-talk, berating yourself for what you did or didn’t do, you’re making something that’s already hard a lot harder.
I’ve been doubling down on intentional self-compassion and writing positive affirmations on post-it notes and putting them on my bathroom mirror. I’ve also made a personal joy list, including all the things I know that make me feel happy, calm, or simply good in some way. For me, knowing that a cup of tea in my favorite chair makes me feel calm or a 10-minute barre3 class makes me feel strong and energized in my body makes a world of difference when I’m feeling overwhelmed by all the things that are beyond my control. These are things that I already know make me feel supported and that I can rely on whenever I need.
I’m an advocate for setting up these reminders and having these resources that you can refer to. While we may think that we inherently know these things about ourselves—what brings us joy, what makes us happy, what makes us feel calm—it’s the simple act of writing it down that can help us when we find ourselves in a challenging place.
BARRE3: Healing isn’t a linear journey—and that’s something you outline beautifully in your writing. How have you learned to have compassion for yourself through the ups and downs of your healing journey?
NATALIE: One of the most difficult things about that truth is that you can know it and you can agree with it, but when you take one of those dips down or steps back, it’s challenging to recognize that it’s not permanent. I’ve worked really hard to shift my language away from framing something as a failure.
It’s been important too, to know that you can really only do your best. I try to recognize the context of my circumstance and honor my efforts even if I’m not getting results as quickly as I’d like them. Each day, I can only do the best with what I have.
BARRE3: What would you tell someone who’s faced with the challenge of living with chronic illness?
NATALIE: If you’re going to focus on anything, focus on finding kindness for yourself inside of your circumstances. You are going through a really difficult thing, but you also hold the most influence over whether it will be more difficult or whether you’ll be able to flow through the hard parts with greater ease.
When you start there, and when you start your days by asking how you can best nurture and be kind to yourself, the answers to those questions will always point you in a positive direction. It might be slow, but the more love you offer yourself, the more motivated you will be to take care of yourself. When it’s driven by love and respect, it all just flows a little more easily.
Thank you Natalie! You can learn more about Natalie by visiting her blog or following her on Instagram.
And if you want to get started with barre3, find your local studio or sign up for our 15-day free trial for unlimited access to hundreds of online workouts and more!
Meet Natalie Sayre, creator behind the blog, Mindful Migraine. In her writing and content, Natalie shares a voice that communicates a grounded presence, helping her readers feel instantly at ease. Her posts and reflections are deeply personal, exploring her journey living with chronic pain, but her writing conveys an important truth for anyone living with a chronic condition: When we share and connect with our communities, we can find gratitude, hope, and purpose in our lives.
Below, Natalie reflects on embracing vulnerability and building a mindfulness practice that supports her each day, and she shares why barre3 10-minute workouts are at the top of her joy list. Dive into this inspiring interview and get ready to take on any challenge with kindness, understanding, and love for yourself.
B3 MAG: Can you start by sharing a bit about your journey living with chronic illness?
NATALIE: For most of my early life and teenage years I was really healthy, but when I started my freshman year of college, I began to experience migraines for the first time in my life. They were painful and scary, but because I have a family history of migraines, they weren’t alarming.
But over the next four years, the frequency and severity of my migraine attacks increased dramatically. They went from happening every few months to lasting an entire day for multiple days in a row. It was extremely challenging. The migraines became a really big problem that I had to navigate while still trying to do all the things that I had come to expect my body to be able to do.
As someone who has always been highly motivated, a go-getter, and an honor roll student, I became consumed with trying to push through the pain and continue to show up at my best. It wasn’t until my health issues escalated to the point that I was forced to stop everything that I was able to look back and reflect on how difficult that was. At the time, I thought I was doing pretty well, but in hindsight, it’s clear how much I was struggling and how hard I was trying to work around the difficulties that each day presented.
B3 MAG: When did you start blogging about your chronic illness?
NATALIE: When I graduated from college, I moved back to California near my family and decided that I would get my health back on track that summer and start my post-grad life. Of course, it didn’t go according to plan, and in fact, that was just the beginning of what has been a really long journey.
I began working my first full-time job that fall, but within 6 months, my health was crumbling. My doctors told me I needed to stop working—I was grinding myself into the ground and going to the emergency room every other week. I had reached a point where I couldn’t push any longer, and it felt like I wasn’t even really living much of a life. I would go to work and once I got home I would immediately medicate and lie in bed until the next day when I would try to do it all over again.
I started my Instagram account, Mindful Migraine, after a year of not being able to work. I was putting all of my effort into my health, working with different doctors and trying different treatments. That year was so scary and felt like such a low point that I started to seek support online.
I was shocked to find that there were actually people my age who were talking about this online. That was huge, because I had felt like the only person in their twenties who wasn’t doing what you expect to do when you graduate. All my friends, college classmates, and peers were in their first jobs, getting their first apartments, and doing all the “normal” things that you do after you graduate.
I was embarrassed to share how much of a failure I felt like, and it took a lot for me to build up the confidence to share what I was going through. But finding my voice, discovering this community, and being able to help others has been the biggest silver lining of so much pain and struggle. It’s become one of the greatest gifts in my life.
B3 MAG: How has your barre3 practice supported you in your healing journey?
NATALIE: Because I’m fatigued all the time and because exercise is actually a trigger for me and for many people who experience migraine pain, fitness has been really difficult. It’s a delicate dance between knowing that exercise is good for me but not wanting to create more pain for myself.
In college, there was a barre3 studio close to my campus. I had been a handful of times and always loved it. I saw every client receiving full permission to do their own thing. There was an accepting energy and attitude that I loved, and in the back of my mind, barre3 was always something that I wanted to do whenever I could.
After I graduated, there was another studio near where I was living at the time. I must have walked by the studio enough times that I went to the website and found the online program. From there, it didn’t take much convincing. I jumped into the free trial and loved it. The way the workouts were organized made it easy for me to find a workout that gave me exactly what I needed on any given day. Barre3 online became a readily accessible way for me to reintroduce movement into my life that made me feel so good. The program gave me the freedom to jump back into exercise.
The 10-minute classes have really been my saving grace. Where I am physically, ten minutes is my limit. I’m pretty maxed out after those workouts, but I feel great. I feel strong and proud that I’ve completed a workout class. I never find myself thinking, Oh, I only did 10 minutes. Instead, I remind myself that I pulled up a class, pressed play, and did it from start to finish. That’s amazing, and it’s enough.
B3 MAG: You write that you’ve explored how mindfulness can help you shift your experience of your pain and chronic illness—could you dive deeper into that?
For me, coming to mindfulness and meditation was more of a weary surrender than a big embrace. In the beginning, I was so demoralized by the amount of pain that I was in and the way it felt like my life was slipping through my fingers. Emotionally, it was incredibly difficult, but after years of expecting that the next year I would be better and my life would get back on track, I realized that if I couldn’t change what was happening to me, I had to change how I responded to it. Mindfulness became my entry point for experiencing peace.
It took a long time though for me to benefit from the practice. I meditated for the first time for 30 days in a row using the Calm app, and honestly, I thought it was the most pointless thing in the world. But I had heard enough podcasts and read enough books to know that mindfulness could improve chronic pain, so I committed myself to it. It was really just this dogged determination to figure out mindfulness that ultimately helped me build my practice.
B3 MAG: How do you respond when a migraine comes on?
NATALIE: I’m really sensitive to light, noise, stimuli, and activity in general. Usually, if the pain becomes really severe, I have to go up to my bedroom and pull the blackout curtains closed. Sometimes, I’ll listen to an audiobook or a podcast to distract myself, but at times even that can be too much.
For me, meditation has been the second most helpful thing to medication. When I’m inside of pain that I feel like I can’t handle, meditation has taught me how to watch the fear, the frustration, and the sadness, and to know that these difficult emotions are not permanent. I’ll try to coach myself through the pain and my emotions with as much grace as I can. If I need to, I’ll cry and break down, but I also know how to pick myself back up much better than I used to. I remind myself that this moment of pain and challenge can’t last forever. All storms eventually pass—even if they take a long time to do so.
What’s important to note though, is that as wonderful as mindfulness and emotional intelligence can be, they’re not numbing agents. They don’t mean that you won’t feel or experience hard things. They’re tools I use to help me realize that I can be gentle and non-judgmental when I’m discouraged. It’s still going to feel uncomfortable. That realization was huge for me—to know that even if I am being mindful, these are still hard emotions that I just have to let myself feel.
B3 MAG: When faced with chronic illness, it’s easy to let our challenges define us. How have you learned to see and understand yourself beyond the challenges you face?
NATALIE: The challenges and difficulties you carry through life inevitably shape the person you become, the things that are important to you, and the way you move through the world. But I’ve come to understand that just because it’s shaped who I am, it doesn’t need to define who I am. When I had to take a medical leave from work, I lost the identity I had shaped of being a good student, a hard worker, and a committed employee. I felt lost without that understanding of myself.
It took awhile for me to understand that there were a lot of things that didn’t have to do with my work or my health that determined who I was. A lot of my values—being a good sister, a good partner, someone who is caring and grateful—all these things have nothing to do with my illness or my productivity but are a part of who I want to be in the world. They’re what I still focus on today and they continue to guide me in whatever direction I go.
It’s been a long journey getting to this place. I used to hate and focus on the fact that this had happened to me, but I can’t hate it anymore because of where it’s brought me. It’s interesting to find peace with something that’s been so difficult. I realize now that I wouldn’t be who I am and I wouldn’t be this grateful if I hadn’t pushed myself to find gratitude inside of struggle.
B3 MAG: With extended time spent at home and many external stressors entering our daily lives, 2020 has been a challenging year for so many reasons. What have you been doing during this time to help you manage that stress and stay well?
NATALIE: A lot of the tools that I’ve used to cope with chronic illness are highly-transferable to coping with COVID-19 and many of the other challenges this year has brought. What I tell everyone is that the most important place to start and where I’ve started myself is with self-compassion and kindness. There’s no way to get through something hard if you’re being hard on yourself. It doesn’t mean giving yourself total leeway to indulge in self-destructive patterns, but if you’re starting the day with negative self-talk, berating yourself for what you did or didn’t do, you’re making something that’s already hard a lot harder.
I’ve been doubling down on intentional self-compassion and writing positive affirmations on post-it notes and putting them on my bathroom mirror. I’ve also made a personal joy list, including all the things I know that make me feel happy, calm, or simply good in some way. For me, knowing that a cup of tea in my favorite chair makes me feel calm or a 10-minute barre3 class makes me feel strong and energized in my body makes a world of difference when I’m feeling overwhelmed by all the things that are beyond my control. These are things that I already know make me feel supported and that I can rely on whenever I need.
I’m an advocate for setting up these reminders and having these resources that you can refer to. While we may think that we inherently know these things about ourselves—what brings us joy, what makes us happy, what makes us feel calm—it’s the simple act of writing it down that can help us when we find ourselves in a challenging place.
BARRE3: Healing isn’t a linear journey—and that’s something you outline beautifully in your writing. How have you learned to have compassion for yourself through the ups and downs of your healing journey?
NATALIE: One of the most difficult things about that truth is that you can know it and you can agree with it, but when you take one of those dips down or steps back, it’s challenging to recognize that it’s not permanent. I’ve worked really hard to shift my language away from framing something as a failure.
It’s been important too, to know that you can really only do your best. I try to recognize the context of my circumstance and honor my efforts even if I’m not getting results as quickly as I’d like them. Each day, I can only do the best with what I have.
BARRE3: What would you tell someone who’s faced with the challenge of living with chronic illness?
NATALIE: If you’re going to focus on anything, focus on finding kindness for yourself inside of your circumstances. You are going through a really difficult thing, but you also hold the most influence over whether it will be more difficult or whether you’ll be able to flow through the hard parts with greater ease.
When you start there, and when you start your days by asking how you can best nurture and be kind to yourself, the answers to those questions will always point you in a positive direction. It might be slow, but the more love you offer yourself, the more motivated you will be to take care of yourself. When it’s driven by love and respect, it all just flows a little more easily.
Thank you Natalie! You can learn more about Natalie by visiting her blog or following her on Instagram.
And if you want to get started with barre3, find your local studio or sign up for our 15-day free trial for unlimited access to hundreds of online workouts and more!
