Throwback Thursday

Tags

anxiety, awareness, Blogging, healing, spirituality, writing

I used to go swimming a lot.  I looked up how to do front crawl and printed out tips from Dundee Arnhall swimming club (randomly) (thank you, they were great) which I used to read before getting into the pool and hold in my mind:  fingertips enter the water first, pull back towards your belly button with the flat of your hand…  Of course I never thought I was that good, unfairly comparing myself to club swimmers half my age in the neighbouring lanes.  I used to overdo it.  I often used to swim a mile (sixty-four lengths), would berate myself if I only did forty.  I remember once sticking to a routine of doing seventy, eighty lengths, even when my shoulder hurt deep inside.

As you can see I hadn’t yet gotten with the programme re veganism (think of the cows!)

But in between overdoing it in and out of work somehow a little bit of light and awareness managed to get through.

This is what happiness looks like  (First published in May 2014)

I called my sister.  My nephew answered and we had a good talk about ICT- his favourite subject, I did my best with my limited knowledge and gave him encouragement with regard to school as he struggles in some other subjects.  I spoke to my sister and invited myself to visit.  She put me off until half term which is a few weeks away but still, we have arranged a date.  We had a bit of a chat, it was nice, easy.

My husband and I got dressed up and went out for dinner.

I went swimming three times this week.  I bought nuts, seeds, dried fruit, herbal tea and vegetable juice.  I went a whole week without eating cheese.

My boss agreed for me to have a six month break from my therapy group.  Usually therapists get burned out and need a break from their patients but in this case I need a break from the other therapists.  Even though some of them were annoyed, I felt ecstatic, like a huge burden had been lifted from me.  I didn’t even feel guilty.  It gives me loads of extra time too.

I noticed the serendipitous little events and occurrences that make life that bit sweeter: arriving at the pool one day after work, hungry, I found a packet of crisps my stepdaughter had left in the car.  And exactly enough change to get a Snickers bar out of the vending machine (which shows that my healthy eating turnaround isn’t yet totally embedded).  The pool, normally so busy at that time of day, was half empty and the one or two swimmers I was sharing a lane with were polite and considerate, pulling over to allow me to overtake.

I texted a couple of friends to arrange meeting up.  Another friend called me out of the blue and we went out for a curry and to the cinema.  I got lost one day and went into a veterinary surgery to ask for directions and the receptionist very kindly printed out a map and directions for me.

I am training to be a healer and was invited to attend the organisation’s AGM.  It was on a Saturday morning and I was probably feeling neutral at best about attending a morning meeting on my day off.  When I got there I discovered the time had been changed and I was there an hour early.  I felt a little put out and considered just leaving but I stuck around with a group of other early people who complained about the organisation- proving that being a healer doesn’t necessarily guarantee continual sweetness and light.  After the meeting, another trainee who is further along than me was getting assessed and I had the opportunity to watch.  In the event I couldn’t hear what was going on and my teacher said, don’t feel like you have to stay, I know you were expecting to leave earlier.  I checked my phone; I had a couple of missed calls from my son, whom I had loosely arranged to meet up with after the meeting.  But I was drawn to stay and say goodbye to one of the examiners who had held my hand for a long time when we had been introduced and had said quietly to me, when it is your turn, you will pass, I have just assessed you.  So I waited until he was finished and afterwards he asked me to demonstrate on him.   He told me that I was very powerful and one of the best trainees he had ever encountered.  Sometimes obstacles are put in our way to test our commitment and if we remain committed, we are rewarded.

At work I did some healing as part of a staff wellbeing day.  I worked for two hours nonstop, nine people in total, with noticeable, powerful effects.  We were set up in the dining room and had such a queue of people that we went on into lunch and I was still standing there, eyes closed, arms outstretched, looking like I don’t know what when the maintenance department came in to have lunch.  Its official, I thought, the weirdest girl in school is now the weirdest woman at work.   Only now, no one seems to mind!

In Stephen King’s book On Writing he describes a phase he went through when he was drinking heavily and the whole family had to revolve around his work.  He said he used to have a huge leather desk that dominated the room.  Now he says he has a small desk in the corner of the room.  Life is not a support system for art, he says, it’s the other way around.  I didn’t fully understand when I first read it, now I think I do:  my life used to be tormented by my writing; always thinking about it, always thinking should I be at home writing, declining invitations.  I thought writing was The Thing but because it was so hard I used to wonder about and experiment with giving up completely as I said before.  Now I realise, Life is The Thing.  Writing is my own personal support system for life.  I live, I write it down to help me make sense of it.  I live a bit more.  It relaxes me, supports me, wipes away ridiculous worry thoughts and OCD by calming and focussing my mind, giving me clarity of purpose in my life.  That’s all it is.  That’s ALL??!!  Sounds pretty amazing really; I have a personal support system that can be bought for the price of a decent pen and a pad of paper.  Isn’t that better than winning the Booker Prize?

Like my spiritual journey, maybe I have been on a writing journey, pushing myself, experimenting.  As a child I wrote stories.  As a teenager I wrote poetry.  In my twenties I wrote a film script and a novel.  In my thirties I finally plucked up the courage to join a creative writing class and wrote everything:  all kinds of poems and stories, even a novella in a month.  I wrote and performed spoken word poetry and performance stories, learning everything by heart.  I wrote and had published several short stories of women’s erotica, culminating in putting on a launch event at a local sex shop.  Now in my forties, I wrote a therapy self help manual and a relationships guide with my husband before my most recent project, my spiritual memoir.  But it was all still with the overall aim of achieving some kind of end product.  Even my spiritual memoir, even though I found it very helpful and even though I kept thinking it was about something other than writing a book, it wasn’t until after it was finished that I realised: it was about something else, it was about living.  That’s what’s so great about blogging: The living comes first.                            

Recognising myself

Tags

Art, creativity, family, India, Travel, writing

Like coming off a motorway and finding yourself suddenly in a 30mph zone, leaving the demands, mental stimulation, pressures and deadlines of my job was bound to be an adjustment.  But it’s also forced me to face up to myself, unshielded from the work role, my thoughts and feelings no longer subsumed beneath the something else that is career.

Also, I like to get things done, or rather, I like things to be done so I write lists and worry about doing things, even if I don’t always get around to getting that much done.  I feel an urge to have things done as soon as possible, even if I don’t usually have the wherewithal or motivation to actually do them.  Plus, in the heat, you are lucky if you get one thing done a day.

So here I am, in paradise, worrying about getting things done.  The most important thing is the writing, so I’ll talk about that.  Obviously I have this blog, and that kind of takes care of itself.  I write when I have something to say, and post when it is finished.  In between I try, and mostly succeed, to not worry about it too much.  On top of that, I am writing a book with my husband about how we got here (decluttering, shedding attachments, mental leaps and matrix obstacles) and about what happens and what we learn about ourselves during our year in South East Asia.  So far so good, right?

We get up early, have a walk on the beach before it gets too hot, then retreat to the veranda/indoors until the evening, with the exception of possibly going out for lunch (which I managed yesterday, my first eaten-in-India masala dosa!) or to get snacks.  So plenty of time for writing, except that the heat slows everything down, plus I have only just got better from being ill.  But the biggest obstacle to it all, as usual, is my own mind.

I’ve been putting myself under pressure, thinking I have to write this book, try and get it published, finish chapter one as soon as I can so we can get onto chapter two about being in India before we’ve been here too long and forgotten things…  Thinking I have to make it a success, to fulfill the destiny of this adventure, to justify it, and to secure us financially.  So no pressure there then.  No wonder writing chapter one began to feel like a chore.  This demonstrates what a brain can do:  cause anxiety about nothing, when one is ensconced in paradise with nothing at all to worry about.

So after a grounding chat with my husband over breakfast this morning, this is where I am at now:  We have a boat to come back to in the UK, overheads are low so we both only need to work maybe three days a week each, I can sign up to agencies and just do whatever, a variety, so as not to get sucked back into the workplace matrix/politics.  That plan is fine.  As for this year, this is budgeted for, so I do not need to earn any money or worry about earning any money this year.  I can just…  wait for it…  relax and enjoy myself.  And write.  Write for fun, write when I want to, write how and what I want.  Write the book, write the blog.  Write without expectation or pressure.  Write nothing at all some days.

But mostly I will write, of course.  As Elizabeth Gilbert (author of Eat Pray Love, my long time personal bible) says, having a creative mind is like having a border collie for a pet.  If you don’t give it something to do, it will find itself something, and you may not like what it finds.  (This is probably why I have OCD, anxiety, etc etc etc.  There’s no easy answer though, because even when I do keep my mind occupied with writing, I am still capable of getting anxious about that.)

And of course I am still processing what it all means:  Selling the house, packing in my career, abandoning everything and just going off…  It’s not about going travelling, not really.  Or rather, the travelling is a tool.  It gets me away, breaks me away from my old life, from family, and when I return I will be living in a new area quite far away, far enough that no family will ever come and visit probably.

It’s not as if my family was bad.   It’s not as if my life was bad.  In fact it was good by any standard, and way, way better than I would have envisioned as a suicidal teenager or a freakish, teased child.  But, and here’s the but:  It wasn’t really me, or it wasn’t me any more, and the only way I could be me was to get right away from my family; to do something so big and so different that I would become unrecognisable, to them and even to myself.

 

My husband took two Tuk Tuk rides to find a pharmacy for me, and came back with strong antibiotics, gut flora and my thyroid meds, all over the counter, for around £5 altogether.  I started feeling better from the first tablet.  Antibiotics are good and strong here, I think.  My doctor in the UK could only give me three months’ worth of thyroid medication, so I have to buy it while I am out here.  I have a laminated copy of my prescription to keep with my UK issued meds (which are labelled with my name), to show when entering countries, especially Thailand.  I will keep my UK prescription meds for customs and buy and use local meds when I am inside a country for any length of time.

After drinking ginger, lemon and honey tea, and toast and honey whilst I was ill, now I am better, I am on ginger and hot water, mint tea, normal black tea, no honey or sugar in tea, no honey on toast, back to being a proper vegan and to taking care of my teeth.

My capabilities are returning:  I have gone from unable to even think about moving and the journey to Hampi, to talking about Vietnam, Japan, the whole trip.  I am inconsistent, emotional.  Yesterday evening we went out to dinner at a local, simpler place and had a good talk and reconnected.  Talking about capabilities, fears, managing my boom and bust cycle.

So it’s good, we are staying here until Saturday night, almost another week (so two weeks in Goa altogether- twelve nights in Agonda, eleven at this particular high up hut), so I can fully recuperate, get my strength back, and write chapter one (but in a joyful, no pressure kind of way, obviously!).

What I have been reading:

Only one thing, Kim Gordon’s (from Sonic Youth) autobiography.  My favourite bits, paraphrased:  I wanted to be an artist since I was five.  If you track back/observe you can see what it is you are meant to be doing.  (Visual) artists bemoaning that they can’t produce a piece of art that has the impact of a Kinks song.  A lot of artists wish they could produce work that had as much impact as a good song.  I don’t have the answer to that.

What I have been watching:

Only one thing, “Maya Angelou: And Still I Rise” on Netflix

 

Thank you very much for reading

Lots of love

Rachel

Instagram followingthebrownrabbit

 

The Minimalists

Tags

Minimalism, The Minimalists, Work

The Minimalists is a Netflix documentary.  It is what I watched last night whilst trying not to cry about the cats.

I remember reading some time ago that people as they get older tend to stop wanting to read fiction and instead turn to autobiographies.  I understand that, although it is hard as in my experience a lot of autobiographies aren’t that well written, or else the best and only really good bit in it was the bit that was read out on the radio that got me to buy it.

That said, even if there’s one good bit in a book, if the bit is really good, it’s worth it.  Chris Packham’s bit about suicide in his book Fingers in the Sparkle Jar, about all the wonders that he’s seen, which encouraged him, and then about his dogs, which stopped him.  Guy Martin’s description of the big crash, that was the bit that was read out on the radio.  But the bit I really liked was him walking home after a hard day’s work mending trucks and seeing all the houses with people sitting around a big screen tv and him saying:  You don’t get that time back at the end you know.  I love, love love that, and I say it to myself regularly.

Anyway, maybe the visual equivalent is getting into watching documentaries on Netflix rather than watching films.

My husband said that maybe everyone has to experience capitalism and materialism before they can begin to reject it, and so it is fitting that this documentary is American and the movement is being started by super successful people.  These people are smartly dressed, ex high powered career people.  They are not scruffy unwashed hippies.

Oh, and to go off topic for a moment, their teeth!  How do Americans have such incredible teeth (or why do us Brits have such bad ones?  What is the American situation with fluoride?  We have it in our water and in most toothpaste, but some people think it blocks your third eye.)  My teeth are considered good by British standards, but they are not white like kitchen paper, or white like a thick blanket of freshly fallen snow.  It is one of the few things that annoys me about the Walking Dead, although it’s not unique to that show.  Their teeth are still perfect, wouldn’t they be stained and worse, have some missing either from decay or having been knocked out in battle?  Are they all still flossing?  Have all the dentists survived?  I have to suspend my disbelief about the teeth, I complained to my husband.  What, that’s the only thing you have to suspend your disbelief about?! my husband said.

So back to the message of the Minimalists.  I agreed with everything.  It was just what I needed.  If anyone thinks what I am doing is weird, I can feel reassured.  I could even say, ‘I’m a minimalist, there’s a film about it on Netflix’.   I love Netflix.

The people in the documentary had fewer clothes, but they loved them all, and they tended to be better quality, thus showing how we should be both less and more materialistic:  really value and take care of the things we have.

Obviously this would be terrible, but I used to say that I’d like to lose everything in a house fire, so that I could just start again.  This shows what a gloom merchant I was, but my husband is saying he isn’t going to keep any of his clothes (aside from ones he’s taking travelling) and I’m seriously considering doing the same.  I was going to keep work clothes and warm clothes.  But if I’m not intending to do the kind of work that entails shapeless black trousers and modest frumpy tops (a lot of the patients I work with are sex offenders), and my warm clothes are all either poor quality/worn out, isn’t this my golden opportunity to fulfil my long held dream and get rid of everything and start again, with a few well chosen quality items from Cotswold Outdoor?  Alongside my more recent dream of getting rid of everything and just being left with a backpack?  (Plus duvets, pillows, blankets and a few essential crockery items left in someone’s loft or garage for our return.)

It’s not just stuff, it’s ideas I’m realising might be superfluous distractions and worth shedding:  my step grandma picks up litter everywhere she goes, with no gloves, then eats cake at the cafe.  No wet wipes, no alcohol gel.  I’ve never heard of her being sick.  Spending time with her also made me wonder whether all this concern about nutrition is really worth it.  She eats a cereal bar for breakfast, then goes out to the cafe for coffee and cake, followed by a good walk.  As far as I can tell she doesn’t eat lunch, I know she never cooks at all anyway.  She grazes on custard creams and chocolate chip cookies and in the evening she has white sliced bread with organic lettuce and tomatoes.

I’ve been wrapping my mind around letting go of my career, and what that means, prompted by interactions with three separate people on the subject.  At work, one of the admin staff told me to ask the admin people for help.  We’re not here to have a career, she said, so we just want to be busy, it helps the day go quicker.  She is a smart, interesting person, with whom I had a good chat about Christmas and minimalism.  We’re not here for a career, rang in my ears.  For so long, I have been all about the career, but what if I could just become the kind of person who wasn’t bothered about all that?

Then there was this blog  about changing attitudes to work and different ways of working, and our happy little exchange in the comments section.  Lastly, me and my husband working out that if we lowered our overheads by living on a boat and sharing a car, maybe we’d only need to work an average of 2-3 days per week each.  We bounced around ideas, cleaning houses for letting agents, especially really filthy houses.  Neither of us is bothered about cleaning up shit.

Just think, he said, if you weren’t bothered about it being a career, then you’d be free to just do anything that came along.  It made me think that the whole career thing is a trap, you think you’re getting something special and even feel superior sometimes, I am very sorry to say, but really, by letting go of all that, I’m free to make my life, rather than my career, the centre of my life.  And that is what The Minimalists are trying to teach us.

It’s A Maze!

Tags

Brian Molko, escape the matrix, Placebo, reality, Work

I’m a big fan of the band Placebo.  Not in the typical sense; I have only ever bought one album, don’t know hardly any of their songs and when my friend was looking to sell her ticket to their sold out Brixton Academy show I didn’t bite her hand off.

But when my son was about seven (20+ years ago) we decided I would paint his room.  He chose the colour from a piece of deep sea blue card one of his drawings had been mounted on at school and I got the colour mixed to match.  Whilst my son was at school I played the first Placebo album over and over whilst I did the painting.  At night whilst he was asleep I stencilled little fish on the walls, using what I had to hand; polypocket wallets as stencils, acrylic paint and mixed up glitter left over from making Christmas cards.

Also during this period I was into doing a Rosemary Conley exercise video.  Once I’d got used to it I didn’t need to listen to the instructions (or the awful soundtrack) so I used to turn the sound down and listen to Placebo instead.

Also, as if to cement it into a special place in my heart, the front cover of the album was a photograph of a little boy who bore a passing resemblance to my son.

This is my favourite song from that album:

One of the things I really love about Placebo, and this is quite childish I know, is that the lyrics can be so catchy and singalong and at the same time so inappropriate to sing at work or in the supermarket carpark.  I often make myself laugh by finding myself singing I’m a fool/ whose tool is small/it’s so miniscule it’s no tool at all/two rubbers two lubes and a silver rocket or this from one of the songs I am obsessively listening to at the moment:  no hesitation no delay/you come on just like Special K/just like I swallowed half my stash and never ever wanna crash.

I also completely love this:

In the comments someone points out how this was in the days before camera phones with everyone just focussed on being totally there.  So much energy, so much unadulterated joy…  and that’s just me in my sitting room…

A few weeks ago my husband bought me the Placebo album Black Market Music from the charity shop and I have since been listening to track 3 (Special K) and track 8 (more on that in a moment) over and over again in the car.  I’ve had the album for a few weeks but only just started playing it:  Timing is everything; it wouldn’t have meant so much even just a few weeks back.  The song mentions ‘Maggie’s farm’, I don’t totally know what that means, I assume it’s like ‘The Man’ and then yesterday evening with the ipod on shuffle out of four and a half thousand songs it could have played it plays Bob Dylan: Maggie’s Farm.  Did I say timing is all?

Just before we gave up, for the moment at least, listening to other people giving us spiritual advice, my husband found some youtube videos all about the importance of language, where words come from and phonetics.  I was only mildly interested, but for five minutes I did play around with the phonetics of some of my favourute blog titles.  I looked at ‘amazing’.  I wondered what ‘ing’ was supposed to mean, but I couldn’t be bothered to look it up.  I wasn’t even all that struck by A Maze.  As I said, timing is everything.

Track 8 of Black Market Music:

So even though I’m switched off from spiritual gurus for the moment, it seems I’ll make an exception for Brian Molko

Run away from all your boredom/all it takes is one decision/a lot of guts and a little vision/to wave your worries and cares goodbye/it’s a maze, a maze for rats to try/it’s a race, a race for rats to die/run away, run away

So, so perfect for right now*.  Thank you.

*This album actually came out in 2000 but there’s no such thing as time, right?  It’s only ever right now.

Keep it in*

Tags

happiness, mental health, OCD, reality

I don’t feel amazing ALL THE TIME.  I am not in control of my thoughts all the time.  I just spent 48 hours plagued by a cocktail of shame, panic, anxiety and OCD type thoughts and all the time the phrase ‘your thoughts create your reality’ was playing in my mind like a threat, a warning, or at the very least, a taunt.

The trigger was an everyday event that could happen to anyone:  a decision you make, then afterwards wonder did I make a mistake?  Do I need to check on that?  Can I check on that?  If something goes wrong because of what I did…  Shame, and panic ensured.  So no, I’m not immune to difficulties.   Why did it happen?  Engaging in ‘low frequency activities’ probably didn’t help and was maybe even the entire cause.  However, coming up close against my own mind like that wasn’t an entirely wasted experience.  I saw my thoughts for what they were.  Unpleasant as it was, I knew what was going on.  And strangely enough, when after 48 hours I was able to check in and found, of course, that everything was absolutely fine, that my worst fears had not actually been realised, I didn’t actually feel that different.  Even through the 48 hours, I went to work, I stayed reasonably calm and positive and I kept in touch with my awareness, unpleasant though some aspects were.

More letting go of furniture and objects around the house.  Thinking of old people whose homes haven’t been decorated for years and who have had the same things around them for years.  As they do less outside the home, and spend more time in it, maybe the wallpaper, the furniture, the ornaments, maybe they all loom larger.  Because those things are given more attention and are all tied up with the memories they hold.  People say things are important because they hold our memories.  People say when they customise their homes they put something of themselves into it.  Yes, they do:  they put in energy from the present moment.  Just having things takes your energy, either if you believe in things being created by your own mind; or else via the emotional resonance of the object; or just simply by the energy involved in dusting, cleaning and noticing it.

So if you didn’t have those things, that same energy would remain in you (or go back into you if you get rid of the things and cut ties to them).  Let’s think about it for a moment:  where would you rather your life force, your energy, resided; inside you, to make you as strong, as powerful and as full of energy as possible, or in an old starburst clock?

Is this why people get old?  Not only do they stop moving, they also let their energy drain out into things, houses, wallpaper, curtains…

In the garden today, noticing the stone white goose the old person left behind, the earthenware pots… I fell in love so easily, I loved it just as it was, I didn’t want to change a thing.  Yet today, pulling up the vegetables, much of them planted and left untended and uneaten, I’m okay, I’m ready to leave.  As if, that was nice, or, that was strange, but it’s over now.  I thought about work:  I’m leaving before I go insane.  Or perhaps I am insane, that’s why I am leaving.  I’ve been doing this fairly conventional job for twenty years- I have no friends at work, no ‘people’; I get anxious every morning before work, even after all this time.  Why?  Why have I been doing this to myself?  Until recently, I thought I was happy there.  As Jung says:

 

*As in energy- don’t put it into Things.  As in sex- keep it in your pants.  As in don’t- sometimes it’s best to share what’s going on.

 

 

 

The Process by Which It Happens

Tags

spirituality, writing

So simple, so amazing: a journey into awareness

Chapter 4:  The Process by Which It Happens

 

I am not aiming for balance, or a balanced life, oh no, Elizabeth Gilbert says you cannot do that and I largely concur.  I am aiming for a happy life subject to circumstances and a ‘spiritual’ life whatever the circumstances, indeed friction helps me grow.  I am glad to be developing and all my life is helping me to do that (all my life as in all that’s going on in my life right now and all my life as in past, present and future).  I fully know I may concentrate on one part sometimes and other parts other times and that life will show me what to do next.

Money:  ‘Studying’ (aka obsessively binge watching) Shameless USA, reading about the Buy Nothing movement, hibernating, in order to get my finances under control.  I didn’t set out to watch Shameless in order to do this, but I am sure it helped.  Spend as little as possible.  Who needs money when you’ve got words.  Not being flippant about people who don’t have money for food, I just mean that I can cope with staying in etc because I have this to do.

Work:  I got locked in my pattern again:  I take on too much, get too tired, or in this case, there just was too much happening (lots of people leaving/off sick); me pretending to everyone including myself that it is okay and not accessing support.  I end up feeling burned out, thinking I have to meet the every emotional, professional, advisory and every other need of everyone in my team whilst also doing a good job for my patients, other dept. duties, answering emails, thinking up new stuff, keeping one step ahead, keeping everyone happy… all of which is obviously ludicrously impossible.

The next thing that happens is that I start to get self conscious and paranoid, worrying about what everyone thinks of me, wondering if anything I do is any good, wishing I could start over again and be different- stop being shy, communicate better, stop avoiding the strong senior managers because I’m intimidated.  I avoid criticism, I am scared of it so I avoid people, and that just makes everything worse…

To contradict what I just wrote, I have actually in many ways been more relaxed at work.   I have stopped to chat.  I have worked slowly.  I have left things undone.  I have chosen the fun things and put off the boring ones.  I have cancelled things to make my week manageable.  I have noticed that I usually go around on full pelt (resenting others who stop to chat!) and the busier I get, the more I take on; working up to the last minute so I am always late and stressed, as if I don’t deserve to take it easy and sit calmly in a room waiting for a meeting to start (I have done this at least once recently!).  It’s going to be an adjustment…

So although tonight’s writing mission was mainly about dealing with work stress, and was more about writing as therapy than writing, that doesn’t mean I don’t want to finish this book:  Don’t get distracted by the idea that you should be so ‘spiritual’ as to be above wanting or needing to do anything.  This might be idealised as sitting on top of a mountain meditating but in practice becomes eating oven chips and cold baked beans and watching rubbish on Netflix*.  A creative mind is like a border collie, remember…

(*There is really great stuff on Netflix but it is definitely possible to waste time on it as well.)