Everyday Gratitude

Tags

depression, gratitude, happiness, healing, spirituality, step children

Yesterday* was a good day. The weather was nice which helped of course. Today it is raining and it is already an effort to recall the feelings I had yesterday. We had returned from holiday the day before, the kids (my step children) had gone home and my husband was back at work. I had an entire day with which to do whatever I wanted.

We are often told to think of people in poor countries and feel grateful for what we have. I agree, but I don’t need to think so far afield to feel grateful. I think of myself even ten years ago, I didn’t have all that I have now. Twenty years ago I was sometimes short of money for food and bills; I didn’t have a reliable car or money for weekends away. I am also sure that the childhood me would have been happy with the life I have now: I have all the freedom I want, true love and two cats!

I did three loads of laundry, and enjoyed it. I remembered how lucky I was to have a working washing machine at home. In the past I have had to use a launderette or wash everything by hand in the bath, neither of which I enjoyed.

I went shopping and got food to make a healthy home cooked meal full of vegetables for dinner, having eaten out a lot on holiday. The fact that we ate out so much is also a cause for gratitude. I went to the pool for a swim. In my purse I have a swim card, paid for on a monthly direct debit, which entitles me to go swimming as often as I like. This makes me very happy. I did all this in a reliable car, which is booked in for an MOT next week, and although I am financially aware of this expense coming up, it doesn’t fill me with worry or fear.

I wrote and posted a blog. I sat in the garden with the hot sun on my back and read a good book. I did a bit of housework and prepared dinner and I didn’t mind doing any of it. I was grateful for the house and the food, happy that all I have to do is this little bit of action (cleaning, food preparation) and in return I get a nice home of my own and a filling, healthy dinner.

Of course, a major contributor to my happiness was the absence of any problems: nothing wrong with the house or the car, nothing wrong with my health, no emotional problems. Also, I wasn’t lacking anything. I had everything I needed. It hasn’t always been like that. There have been times when I have been short of healthy food or clothes or moisturiser, things that notice.

Everyone laughs at how much I take on holiday. But I have noticed recently, what a pleasure packing is, because I have lots of clothes I like, that I actually like wearing, are practical and that I feel good in. I don’t spend a lot of money on clothes, but I seem to have everything I need at the moment. So when my jeans got sandy at the beach, I had another pair. When it rained and those got wet, I had a clean dry pair to put on. And when it got cold I had plenty of warm tops and jumpers. On the last day, just when I was down to the dregs of my suitcase and wondering what to put on, I suddenly realised I had more stuff that I had hung up in the wardrobe, and found a nice, comfortable outfit for travelling home in.

I didn’t write anything down while I was on holiday, so it was in the peace and quiet of yesterday that everything began coming back to me. My stepdaughter saying to me, you’re so good with little kids, I remember when I first met you, you used to play games with me all the time.

Getting up at 5am to go and watch the sun rising over the sea, just me and the kids. Remembering the obvious: the things you give attention to, grow. God and religiosity is closer and stronger the more I pray. OCD recedes if I ignore its ridiculous compulsions. Prayer and healing is easier if done often. Although I might want to brush my teeth and wash my face or even make a cup of tea first, prayer should really come before twitter or facebook in the morning. If I feel dizzy when I do healing standing up, I can sit down instead (I cannot believe it took me this long to think of this). For all of it, I say thank you.

*It has taken me a few days to edit and tidy

Create the conditions

Tags

gong meditation, healing, meditation, sound healing

Gong therapy is my favourite discovery of the past year. Its proper name is gong meditation or sound healing. You just lie down and listen to sounds being played on huge gongs and on didgeridoos, on singing bowls and shakers. You don’t have to do anything. You can’t help but listen. It doesn’t really matter what happens to your thoughts. The sounds go through you anyway, working their magic no matter what you do. And did I mention you are lying down? It’s like meditation for lazy people. Except, the effects can be intense. I first tried it a festival a year ago. This year, I did it again:
That feeling of ‘what’s next’, of striving, isn’t about what I am doing at work, or whether I should change jobs, or about where I live and whether or not to move to a different area. I just thought it was about that because that’s what I see immediately around me when I look at my life.
What it actually is about is my higher self or the real me emerging. Maybe my higher self is just next year’s me… maybe at last year’s festival today’s me was looking on, watching me do gong therapy for the first time.
That sense of pregnancy, of emergence, is my higher self waiting to emerge. How do I get it to emerge? DO NOTHING. Just don’t do anything that hinders the emergence of my higher self. Avoid worry, fear, anxiety and over thinking. As I went through each of these, I felt and was feeling them too. The sound was evoking those states. I felt my chest crushed with fear, my heart palpating with anxiety. A bit later, when I realised I was thinking thinking thinking; a shaker sounded like waves breaking on a stony beach, a singing bowl rang out, and I came back to where I was, to my new found awareness:
My higher self is just waiting to emerge, all I have to do is CREATE THE CONDITIONS.
The man leading the gong meditation talked about the higher self and about rising like a phoenix. As I lay there I imagined… lose two stone, buy an elegant white dress. It’s not about clothes, except that it could be, if I find that helpful. We do, as human beings in society have to wear clothes, so why not occasionally wear something that makes me feel great and supports my emergence.
Stumbling out of the meditation tent afterwards, wobbly and shaky, I found a quiet place to sit and with a hot chocolate beside me, I wrote down everything I could remember.

How to be a healer

Tags

healing, OCD, spiritual healing, therapy

My last post was all about my need for solitude and yet I spent last weekend in the bosom of a crowd of people with barely five minutes alone. I had a really, really good time.
My friend brought us all together. She has three children, 11, 13 and 18, and an event shelter. All three children invited friends, my friend invited her friends and so there we all were, four days camping in a field together, 17 of us ranging in age from 11 to 54, half of us strangers before the weekend.
The weekend relaxed all my inhibitions or maybe I had to relax all my inhibitions in order to embrace the experience of the weekend, I am not sure which came first.
Being with so many young people brought me to realise and accept where I am, i.e. no longer what anyone would call young. At the same time I realised that in some ways I am still the same, my brain hasn’t changed that much, it’s just that I lived through it. In having lived through it perhaps older people send the message to the young that they can live through it too. We didn’t sit giving advice, but just being a person who is older and who has survived, maybe gives a reassuring vibe. These realisations enhanced and strengthened my sense of self.
I had a role, something like: cook, feeder, mum, healer. I felt held in place, but I didn’t once feel like I was putting on an act, making up a role or being anything other than totally myself.
As a healer, the whole weekend was profoundly instructive. Healers need to learn how to heal themselves as well as learning how to heal others. I drove straight from work and was totally and utterly relaxed within a few hours. I lost track of time on day one. Being outdoors in the fresh air for four days felt good. I spent whole days with frizzy hair and no makeup and I felt just fine.
I healed myself of regrets and envy and of getting older. I saw myself concretely reflected by a big group, as having a place, a role and a value. I enjoyed having the company of women.
One of the women taught me a kidney cleansing healing (place left hand on top of head, right hand on kidney and feel the kidney spin, she didn’t know that my husband has had some kidney problems). She told me about bringing up phlegm and that it is okay to vomit during healing (useful as the next day someone I gave healing to was sick during it).
I practiced healing on four people and I learned how to end it (say, ‘blessings to (person’s name)’, the answer comes back, ‘they are blessed’, or, ‘you haven’t finished yet’, in which case, do a bit more, on shoulders, sending it everywhere, or go over the chakras again). I learned how to do grounding (after doing all the chakras, place a hand on the ground beside their feet and another hand of the back of their neck and feel them being ‘earthed’). I learned how to have a conversation with myself and with the other person to ensure I wasn’t pushing them toward a spiritual emergence that they were not ready for (it’s easy to feel evangelical when I have found such personal happiness and want others to share it, especially as I have seen them be sad and think that I can see an opportunity for them to be happier, but people must do things their own way. I thought all this and I said it aloud too). I learned to think about and focus a bit more on the third eye, or brow chakra, as this person was in the middle of thinking ahead and planning for a big decision and event; afterwards she said she had seen an eye, and lots of light.
Healing at a festival was great because I felt super relaxed and in great condition and there was probably lots of positive and healing energy around, from the other people and from the healing area. I went to gong therapy (more next time). I did a bit of drinking, being silly and tipsy in the rain with lots of fun and laughter. I was in my element, happy, relaxed, having a good time.

Standing quietly listening to a band in the music tent, thinking over my last big problem, a fairly mild but definitely present OCD. The conclusion to this music induced thinking session: 1) Resist the compulsions, 2) Relax, 3) If I can’t do it on my own, get help (from husband, a book, or a service).
Since I’ve got home I have gone up to bed first and left my husband to switch everything off. He realises what I am doing and has been supportive in a gently humorous way, perfectly pitched to help me.

It was profoundly healing to be liked and accepted by lots of people and to feel the same about all of them. I made sure I said thank you to my friend. I told her how grateful I was to her for bringing us all together and for allowing me to share her life, because that’s what we do, we share our lives with each other, because you can’t create everything yourself.

The Possibility of Ease

Tags

depression, Iain Banks, love, marriage, religion, solitude, spirituality

When the going’s good I find it almost impossible to imagine feeling down, low in energy or less than totally happy and supremely grateful for my life. When things occasionally dip a little, I find it so hard to get out of and such a puzzle to work out how it happened. That’s because I am a thinker, an over thinker, and it is not easy to think yourself out of a slump. Easier to think yourself into more and more happiness, if one is already happy, like a snowball of prayer and gratitude and bliss… When actually down, thinking is not the answer. Waiting, or waiting with faith, is. After a few days it comes to me: what it is that’s the matter, what I did or didn’t do to get me to this place. Sometimes it’s PMT, sometimes I’m just tired. This time, it was neglecting my need to be alone sometimes.
I prayed for my house to be filled with Love and I realised, it’s me who can fill it, God gives me the support and motivation to do so, but it’s me who actually does it. When there’s any friction, it’s all the more noticeable because it’s such a happy house usually. On the other side of friction there is learning, closeness and new insights. But in the middle of friction is such confusion and muddy thinking that I couldn’t even write anything for a few weeks. Now, however, I am bursting, I had to take the morning off work just to write down all the thoughts that were pouring out of me and to organise all the little scraps of paper with notes and ideas on. But in the middle of friction, everything bad is magnified. It is easy to become irritated and irritable, even whilst wondering fearfully about what is actually happening, where all the bliss went…
One day after work I stopped at the supermarket and instead of rushing home I paused in the car park for five minutes. It was close to sunset and the sky was shot with yellow and gold, the clouds luminous at their edges. The air was cool and warm at the same time. I had bought myself a little tub of fresh olives and I leant against the car, eating them carefully so as not to spill any oil on myself, whilst looking at the big, open Norfolk sky and feeling the air on my skin.

I have just finished reading Whit by Iain Banks. It is about a religious cult that tries to operate in the spaces, to be creative in all that they do, in order to be closer to God. So they travel the most complicated or unusual way rather than just hopping on a train, because in those interstitial places, is where God is found.
In the supermarket car park that evening, I realised: Be Creative. It doesn’t have to be at home. I have Saturdays or Sundays most weeks to myself anyway, I also swim two or three times a week, I drive an hour each way to work five days a week, composing my thoughts, my writing. Sometimes I pull over and write things down in my notebook. I realise driving is not quite the same as being alone not having to do anything. Reading Iain Banks, I realised I’ve always enjoyed interstitial time. Like when I pull up at the pool and instead of going straight in I read for a while or just listen to something I’m enjoying on the radio. Or when I pull over and park up for a nap during a long journey (or let’s face it, not that long, it’s just me, creating a little pocket of space, although the talcum powder footprints on the passenger door hint at something more exciting than just curling up on the back seat and dozing to The Archers). Often it has revolved around food, especially ‘naughty’ food that I am happier not admitting to eating. Smokers do it with cigarettes, I suppose, that little bit of semi forbidden or secret time.
Sometimes I’m a bit slow when it comes to realising things about myself. In the middle of the friction time, I was chatting to a work colleague I hardly know, in a rare moment of sharing and we were both saying about how we struggle to get any time alone in the house, as our partners are usually home before us. She told me the story of how the other day she had hoped and looked forward to an hour and a half at home, but what with being delayed at work, a phone call from her mum, and new neighbours deciding to pop round and introduce themselves, this time dwindled as she counted it down in her head until she was left with just five minutes. I understood completely. I said, but I feel so bad, I so longed for my man to come to live with me and now he’s here I’m talking about wanting time on my own. She replied smartly, but you must do it, because otherwise you will get irritated. But it still wasn’t until the olives in the car park a week or so later that I realised what had been the cause of my uncharacteristic irritation.
I will endeavour to make the most of the little spaces of time alone I get in the house, to use them for writing or reading or napping or whatever I want to, and appreciate them! But I must also accept that they are rarer and learn to be flexible and to create little pockets of alone time outside of the house: really feel it when I go swimming, for example. Go upstairs and nap or write even when I am not alone in the house. Create a pocket of independence and stillness whatever and wherever. It doesn’t take much. An afternoon alone in the house to write once a week. Ten minutes alone with a tub of olives and a pretty sky. And then I am back, full of love.