Throwback Thursday: Therapy Part Two

Tags

CBT, healing, OCD, Self healing, stress, therapy, Work, Work place stress

At the start of every ‘therapy for the therapists’ group there was always a mindfulness exercise and for the first time I understood why we teach this to our patients who have severe emotional and mental distress.  I was nervous, but I focussed on the task:  I am sitting here, in a chair, the table is brown, the window is square.  Just the bare unarguable facts, no suicidal despair, no ‘I can’t cope, I am a leper’.  Just deal with what is in front of me.

A few weeks’ later and a few more weeks of Jaim’s lovely therapy and another therapy group meeting.  This time the mindfulness was not a ‘describing’ exercise like before but a ‘doing’ exercise.  In silence, the group leader handed out photocopies of Valentine’s Day themed Sudoku.  Printed on the bottom of the sheet was the website address: Activities for kids.  Now, when Sudoku first became a thing in England, I did try it and did know how to do it.  But that was a long time ago, and faced with this sheet, in the tense silence of the therapy group, I realised I had absolutely no idea what to do.  I ran through the options in my mind:  stay still, be mindful of the discomfort, and say nothing.  Or ask for help- traditionally we don’t often speak in mindfulness, but mostly the task is relatively simple and clarification isn’t normally needed.  I thought that if it was my turn as facilitator I wouldn’t mind if someone asked- in fact I wouldn’t want them to sit silent and confused.  So I broke the silence and asked the facilitator and my neighbour who both tried to give me brief and hushed advice.  Unfortunately it was no good, maybe because I’d got even more tense at speaking, maybe because the mindfulness section is so short they didn’t spend long explaining it, so I sat, writing anything in the boxes with no clue, feeling hot and uncomfortable but at the same time, a bit of me was laughing, a bit of me was looking forward to telling Jaim about it.  And a whole lot more of me knew that whatever was happening in that moment, underneath and beyond it I was still intact, still me, and would come out unscathed.

Jaim and I laughed long and hard about it.  ‘What, you mean, you, 15 years experience as a therapist, head of department, manager of a team of twenty, don’t know how to do Sudoku, I mean, really, what will everyone think!!!’ Jaim laughed.  He added more seriously: ‘the aim isn’t to avoid ever having a low mood or a bad experience, but to be able to let them go afterwards’.

Eliminate these behaviours and thoughts and I can experience pure happiness at least for a period, until and unless events in life happen as they do but it is true that at present I have no sad events or issues so it would be a shame to waste this opportunity to be perfectly happy.  

Driving home from work, listening to Radio 4, I heard someone say:  ‘Treat it as normal, that will help it to become normal’.  Yes, I thought, that is exactly what I need to do.  That could cure my suicidal thoughts and urges, my workplace anxiety, my body issues, my self consciousness, my OCD and all the rest of my various neuroses.  They were actually talking about Northern Ireland, but that kind of detail doesn’t bother me, I was listening to the radio at the time, so I’m taking it for my own.

But even as counselling is releasing years of blocks and bad habits from my mind, and recently rediscovered yoga and recently discovered deep tissue massage is releasing years of guilt and tensions from my body, a part of me is fighting to undermine this new found happiness.  New OCD behaviours appear and strange new worries spring up.  The mind is fighting back: Well you could be happy, but stuff always happens.  What if he’s just waiting until you are strong enough to manage on your own and then he’ll leave you?  What if he has an affair with your friend?  What if he dies?  What then?  But like in Eat Pray Love (the book, always the book) when she just sits on the beautiful island in silence for days and days while all her guilt and neuroses surface and then subside, I am just going to look kindly and patiently on whilst all this stuff works itself out and is eliminated, out of my mind, out of my body.

And then, in meditation, the thought came:  what if this feeling that I am interpreting as stress, anxiety, tension, confusion, OCD, what if it’s just a pregnant transition and is just me, teeming with energy?  It isn’t mental illness; it’s me, teeming with energy, coming into my powers.  And the power, the energy is just waiting to be told what to do, or for me to put them into action.

I’ve still got a fear of madness when I open doors in my mind.  Just like I have a fear of getting fat, stiff and unfit if I stop exercising and let myself off for a few days.  A fear of being totally lazy and losing all my drive if I sleep in or rest up or do nothing.  A fear of losing control at work or being sacked if I don’t work 100% all the time.  What if all these fears are equally unfounded? 

Like how anorexics, with devastating consequences, absorb the public health messages about food whilst obese people ignore them; I absorbed the ‘take responsibility’ and ‘accept guilt’ messages when I didn’t always need to.  Could it be possible that I am not guilty of everything that I accused myself of?

… Each moment is both unique and yet also the result of the previous moment and all previous moments, like beads being threaded on a string.  Is that that what heaven or enlightenment is, simply the result of day after day of right living? 

What if the happy, positive me, like when I am all chatty and cheerful and friendly at work, is the real me, and the dark, miserable one is not, is just a shadow trying to drag me back down, yet I used to think that was the real me, and the cheerful one was false, a front.

I went on facebook for the first time in weeks, and Elizabeth Gilbert had posted that having a creative mind is like having a border collie for a pet: if you don’t give it work to do, it will find itself something to do, and you may not like what it chooses.  This aligned with what the man on a work wellbeing course said: worry is a misuse of the imagination, give your mind something better to do.

It made me think of worry and also OCD.  Is it as simple as that?  Forget all the exposure exercises and behaviour charts; just give myself something big and all consuming to do- fall in love, write a book, etc.  I remember someone on a creative writing course writing about OCD, maybe she would be able to cure herself by writing more?

I didn’t tell Jaim about the OCD:  I didn’t want to be like one of those patients that goes to a ten minute appointment and adds loads of other issues on at the end of the appointment and anyway I was prioritising the most dangerous.  I also thought that maybe it would recede as all the other stuff got sorted.  And that if it didn’t, well, I’d got help once, I could always get help for the OCD later.  Or just employ same method: awareness.

One night late, on my own, before I went to bed I looked up some OCD self help information.  It was reassuring, very reassuring, as long as I can fully absorb it:

• Intrusive thoughts are common and are an OCD symptom, i.e. they are not me.  Sad, to think of all those people persecuted by thoughts, that they can’t share, and that get worse and worse until they are totally taken over.
• Worrying about them, blocking them, or taking them seriously are all things that make them worse.
• Laughing at them can help, as can reminding yourself that everyone has them and they don’t mean anything.

I thought about all the other healing I have done and realised that I can easily cure myself of my OCD, simply by using the method I have thus far employed for everything else I have done:

• Let go of it.  Un-hook my attention and my interest, hook by hook, until it disappears.  It is my attention and interest that make it a thing, that give it form, without that, it is nothing.
• And realise that even when I do have it, it doesn’t bother me, I am still intact underneath.

It’s like healthy eating:  in the moment of deciding and then starting you can feel totally healthy and transformed even whilst accepting that the body and health you have is the result of years of poor eating and will take a while to change/catch up.  Perhaps this is a secular version of the nature of forgiveness?

Postscript:

Gratitude on top of gratitude:  In January the man I had had all the difficulties with before Christmas was moved to another job and I never had to see him again.

Thank you very much for reading

Throwback Thursday: Therapy

Tags

CBT, stress, Suicidal, suicidal thoughts, suicide, therapy, Work, Work place stress

The night before I returned to work after Christmas, Anthony asked me if I was ready.  I said, ‘well my work clothes and bag are sorted’.  ‘I meant psychologically’, he said.  ‘Well in that case, no, not at all’.  The thought of facing that man (just before my Christmas break I had a horrible meeting at work with a very confrontational man) again was unbearable.  ‘Surely you must have a strategy for dealing with him?’ Anthony asked.  ‘Only the ultimate one’, I muttered.  ‘For God’s sake Rachel, you can’t kill yourself over someone at work.  You aren’t a depressed Goth teenager anymore.  I really think it’s about time you got some help with this’. 

I had been thinking about it.  The idea of getting help had come to me in meditation.  I had never sought help before, although I had had suicidal thoughts on and off since I was fifteen.   

I had even imagined myself doing a talk about it, at some kind of mental health event, about being in that lonely attic office at work where no one came to see me without an appointment, and then my knee started really hurting so I had to move to a downstairs office that is much more public and you can’t hear people coming from a distance, they just appear.  Just before I was moved downstairs I was having very strong suicidal urges.  I had brought a craft knife in from home for an art session, but it sat on the top of the filing cabinet screaming ‘method’ to me.

So on the 12^th January 2015, coincidentally (i.e. I hadn’t done it intentionally) one year to the day since I had driven to Wells-next-the-Sea with my swimsuit on under my clothes and bathed in the cold North Norfolk sea as a commitment to the spiritual path, (described in my previous book How to Find Heaven on Earth, which is for sale super cheap on Amazon) albeit my own eclectic and ever-changing made-up spiritual path, but still, I meant it, I picked up the phone and rang the work telephone counselling service.

The phone was answered with a lovely softly spoken Spanish accent, by a man called Jaim. Talking with this calm, gentle man every Friday morning… I sat on the floor of my office with a Do Not Disturb sign on the door and an A4 pad in front of me and as he talked I scribbled down as much of it as I could.

Gently, he dismantled the strange framework I had built inside and around me.  Rachel, he said, ‘Thoughts are not real; they are just like when you are watching a film or reading a book, there is no obligation to engage with them.’

No obligation to engage with them?  Are you sure?  The idea of letting them go and letting myself off was tantalising and delicious but I felt conflicted and guilty at the same time.  Surely, if I have an idea as serious as killing myself I should give it some attention?  I mean, I must be thinking it for a reason?  Or at the very least, the fact that I have thoughts like this surely means there is something very wrong with me and that I am not like everyone else.  And if I did give up the suicidal thoughts, I wouldn’t have an ultimate Plan B or anything to hang onto In-Case-Of-Emergency.  

But Jaim helped me see that the thing I’m hanging onto is unhelpful to the extent that it has become the problem itself, rather than a solution to the problem.  The original problem has gone and all I am left with is the original solution, which has now become a problem:  The Problem.  I used to think it was a safety net for when I got all freaked out and scared about things that I found difficult.  But what if I just say fuck off to it as it as it arises?  And what if instead of freaking out over challenges and fears I just get on with whatever task is in front of me?  But what will I do without all that to fall back on?  Answer: Probably manage quite well or even better:  suicidal thoughts do not actually help.

If thoughts and what I think isn’t really who I am, then who am I?  How do I know who I am?   Is it rather what I do, and the reflection of myself and my actions in the people around me?  Question:  What to think about instead?  I don’t want to stop thinking, I like thinking…  Jaim said:  ‘Why should you stop the activity of the mind?  But you can direct it more consciously to what you want.  It’s a myth that stopping the mind, that that is what meditation is all about.  Imagining, creation, ideas, are all good things!’

My mind is working better- not thinking unhelpful thoughts.  I am learning not to fill my mind with noise except when chosen:  a subject of interest on Radio 4, music for pleasure, choosing consciously, rather than ‘filling without knowing’ in Jaim’s words, when you don’t allow yourself any silence or space to choose:

‘If you work too hard and fill every moment with purpose in a rush of doing you forget to just be.  Allow yourself times of silence and moments of non doing.  It’s in these moments that you realise who you are.’  Jaim said:  ‘Accept who you are, warts and all.  You have been afraid of showing yourself to be weak, forever trying to please someone else, to be ultra efficient, perfect and invincible but nobody is that.  Ask when you don’t know.  Tell yourself that it’s okay for me not to know.  It’s okay to sometimes not be on top of things.  Your previous assumption- ‘I can’t cope’- meant you had to demonstrate the opposite and that was the cause of much stress.  The need to prove is a constant source of nervousness.’

I told him about the man I had the meeting with, and that I was scared of facing him again.  Jaim said calmly:  ‘In my experience there is something simple that will perhaps help you; to be aware, preferably in real time, or if not as soon as possible after, of how you are feeling.  Monitor carefully your changes of mood.  This is the first indicator that something is happening.  If you feel upset, sad or worried, just notice, enquire with an open mind, what is going on, not criticising, not should, not should not, just:  Why?  What is the reason?  What is actually happening?  Outer event?  Memory?  Interpretation as threat?  Understand your interpretation:  what are you thinking?  I’m not good enough?  I won’t cope?  Deal with these asap- of course I am good enough, I can cope.’

 ‘Watch out for winter and being tired.’

‘The more you cultivate and develop the ability to observe yourself (your thoughts, feelings and behaviour), the more you will be able to deal with adverse circumstances without panicking.’

‘Your observing mind is the wise part of you that is there to keep an eye on things in the control room, ready to respond to any variations:  red lights= respond quick.  Observe the dashboard of your life, trust you have the ability to deal with it.  Choose to take appropriate action instead of panicking and giving into depressed or unhelpful thoughts.  There is usually a way out.’

‘Every half an hour, stop and check in, how I am feeling and why, very simple.  You have been so scared of not coping but don’t pre-empt it, don’t assume.  Whatever comes to meet you you will find time and a way to deal with it.

You have done it so far! (You have been around a while)’.

‘Being aware stops you being on autopilot, and when you are on autopilot your subconscious mind takes over and can lead you astray.’

‘When we are well we feel well, it’s an inbuilt gauge telling us life is going well.  When you get an uncomfortable feeling, that is a warning light:  use your feelings to help you.  Sometimes it will be a simple solution, sometimes it will be more complicated, that’s okay, we will never understand everything.  Feelings are valid:  they are telling you something.’

‘You are making decisions every minute, you start afresh every minute: life unfolds in the present.’

Then as I began to get better:  he said:  ‘The difference is, you are not beating yourself up.  You might be doing something wrong, if so, you can correct it.  You are walking through life with your wits about you, paying attention to yourself and what’s around you.  Observe your thoughts and behaviour, watch the dashboard, watch for changes in mood and take action accordingly.  Do you realise how important this is?  Feels life changing!’

Replacement coping strategies:

• Help is always available, all you have to do is ask
• Whatever comes your way you will be able to deal with it, as you have always done thus far

Thank you very much for reading

 

What does living in accordance actually mean?

Tags

confidence, creativity, Eat Pray Love, following your dreams, happiness, India, Living in accordance, relaxation, Spiritual experience, spiritual memoir, stress, Travel memoir, writing

Ann wrote about it beautifully here, about how we can be so aware of what others might or might not think/the approval/disapproval of others that we stifle what actually makes us stand out.

SMUT. AND SELF-ESTEEM wrote a beautiful piece about what it looks like and what the effects are.

In Eat Pray Love (the book, always the book) a young man goes off to spend time in an ashram in India and goes home and waxes lyrical about it to his father, who is sitting quietly looking into an open fire.  ‘It gives you a quiet mind, Dad,’ the son says.  ‘I already have a quiet mind, son,’ the father answers.

In India it was a big focus of my husband’s to learn to relax completely without feeling guilty.  In Pushkar the owner of the guesthouse emphasised again and again how important relaxing was and was in the process of creating another relaxation area for guests.  He told us that the local Chief Minister had even commissioned the creation of a garden for Indians and Westerners to relax in.

Yes, I went from a forty hour a week stressful job to not working, and of course I gradually unwound, rediscovered myself etc etc.  But I didn’t want to do nothing, and I didn’t want to come home without the trip having meant something or resulted in something concrete.  So I wrote, an hour or two or more almost every day, writing for my travel memoir and for this blog.  I often pushed myself too hard, writing when my hand, arm or shoulder hurt- I have some RSI- or when my brain had gone foggy.

The real lessons of India perhaps haven’t sunk in until I am back here in the UK.  I’m still writing almost every day for a couple of hours.  I stop when my brain is tired or when my body aches.  I go for a walk every day, sometimes twice.  I cook and eat healthily.*  What I’ve noticed recently is how quiet my mind is.  Really there’s only two, three subjects on there.  The book, the chapter I’m on, *, and the sheep and lambs opposite.  All is quiet with my family, I’m maintaining a healthy emotional distance to keep my independence and boundaries.  The only thing really are the sheep and lambs opposite who I have become very fond of.  And there’s sheep and lambs everywhere, and if I don’t watch it I can 1) Get fond of them; watching them jump in the air, run up and down the small hill, eat grass, eat hay, suckle from their mum, etc,  and 2) Think about what’s going to happen to them.

But compared to my previous list of worries this is nothing.  And compared to how we often felt during the last half of the trip, fearful about the future, now it/I am here it doesn’t feel scary at all.  Just get up, live, repeat.  With less on my mind I’m a lot more present.  The only things I want to do each day are write for a couple of hours and go on one or two walks.  Minor chores such as emptying the loo or doing some hand washing (laundry!) are easily fitted in. So the rest of the time, it doesn’t matter what I do, and I can go with it easier.  As opposed to before when I’d be constantly thinking ‘What’s next,’ about protecting my ‘me’ time, and almost overdoing things in my mind and in practice the way I overdid things at work, almost like a form of self harm.

It’s like I had to do all that, to get here.  I mean I could have just sold the house, bought a boat to live on instead and used the spare money to have a year off to become a writer, but I never thought of that.  Doing it all to go to India seemed somehow more obvious a thing.  And of course it gave me something to write about.  Or rather, something beautiful to hang my random internal thoughts around.  And now I’m here, sitting at my little desk in my little study area, writing, and not really worrying about anything else.

*except for you know whats, those pastry things I am obsessed with

Photograph: It was my birthday at the end of April, we don’t really do presents or not in a big way if we do, my husband bought me a new chain (the original one had recently broken) for my Om necklace that I bought in Kerala to mark a spiritual experience there, plus vegan birthday cake and vegan chocolate from the health food shop, plus gin, tonic and lemons, and Corona and limes.  He waited on me all day, and made dinner while I lounged in the bedroom and watched Netflix.  Okay so the partying took a few days to get over, that’s why we don’t do it very often, but you’re only forty-nine once.

Thank you very much for reading

About the author

Sold house, left job, gave away almost everything else.  With husband went travelling for a year, mostly in India.   Here are my India highlights.  Now back in the UK, living on a narrowboat, and writing a personal travel memoir.

For more photographs of the trip see Instagram travelswithanthony

 

 

 

Throwback Thursday

Tags

anxiety, creativity, relationships, spirituality, stress, Work, writing

What strikes me the most when reading these old posts is that I was trying to do too much; working full time in a demanding job, swimming several times a week, writing, spiritual seeking/meditation etc, trying to keep in touch with friends and family, and enjoying and being present for the relationship of my life with the love of my life.

Yes, creative people need time alone.  Yes, I had been used to solitude as a child and as a single parent with those lonely evenings and weekends.  Yes it was an adjustment living with someone.  But I think it would have been easier if I hadn’t been rushing around doing so much, if I had made some space and learned to prioritise the most important things and let go of the rest. 

I still have those tendencies (to overdo the busy-ness), but I am more aware of them.  Right now we are living and travelling together, and are with each other most of the time.   I can write when my husband is there, and I don’t worry about doing much else.

The possibility of ease (first published August 2014)

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.

Throwback Thursday

Tags

family, spirituality, stress

This is the first blog post I did.  Of course you never get to the end of a spiritual journey but here I had obviously reached some kind of plateau.  Other than that I was preoccupied with how I spent my time and with doing too much.  I hadn’t accepted as I do now the need to specialise and to have a committed routine for writing.  On a more personal note, although I tried for a while I have now let go of keeping in touch with people who either don’t keep in touch back or with whom there isn’t a real connection.  

Is fun the final frontier?  First published in May 2014

Is fun the final frontier?   So what do you do when you reach the end of a spiritual journey?  What next?  There’s this restless, ‘Is that it?’ feeling.  A crackling energy with no clear outlet.  It’s the way I feel when I haven’t been swimming for a few days.  I toy with using that energy for other things, for work, or conversation but there’s no bargaining to be had.  I need to go swimming and that’s that.  Even though occasionally I play or experiment with not doing it just to check that yes, it really is that important to me.  And I am especially tempted towards this type of experimentation now.   I should also add that as well as my spiritual journey, I also finished my spiritual memoir and not for the first time, am taking a little break from writing, or, as I have done before, experimenting with not doing it, to see what that feels like.  To check if it really is necessary, or am I okay without it and perhaps meant to be doing something else instead.

Except today I started writing this but this is more a documentation of the ‘what next’, rather than the start of a Grand Project.  And whereas before, when I have been miserable and conflicted when I experiment with not writing, right now I have been enjoying the freedom, the sense of space, the oodles of time and headspace and the increased connectivity and participation in the real world.

I look around and see that plenty of people are content, nay, happy with just going to work, exercising, cooking and seeing family.  I wonder if I could be too, although I know immediately that the answer to that question is no.  As my husband said when I discussed it with him, they are fulfilled by that and that’s fine, but if you are fulfilled by other things, that’s fine too.  So I am going to assume that that thing is writing and act accordingly.  No big new projects, no grand plans, just this, writing it up, one page at a time.

So, what next?  I enjoyed having a rest from my head and from my long and winding journey.  I had a massage and enjoyed being grounded in the physical.  But then I had a couple of weeks of just… drifting… getting myself into an almost bored state, thinking, wondering about my state of mind.  I stopped doing any homework for my healing training and I stopped exercising regularly.  I let myself eat a lot and put on some weight.  But I didn’t feel at all bad, even when last minute shopping for an outfit for a wedding reception and looking big.   I knew I was just doing temporary experiments and I was enjoying it to an extent, but without my rigid rather punishing regimes of exercise, healing practice and writing I began to feel my sense of direction was fast disintegrating.

But until I let go of everything, how can I let go and let God;  how can I know what to keep in my life and what to discard, unless I loosen my grip on all of it and entertain, even if just for a brief moment, the notion that nothing is forever?  Boredom breeds creativity, is one theory.   I considered writing a list, an inventory of everything in my life, all the family and the friends, the acquaintances, the resources, my work, the house, etc etc.  I even considered doing a SWOT analysis and a plan linked with regular reviews, just like I do for my department at work.  I thought, shouldn’t my life get at least as much attention as my job?   But life, at least a spiritual life, doesn’t roll like that.   And I want a spiritual life, I really do.

In the last few weeks I went to a family funeral.  It made me feel alive and it reminded me which bits of family I actually like to be with and want to see more of, as well as which people I feel guilty about not seeing.   It sounds so simple put like this:  I will call those people I like and go and see them.   No need for a big family do, just see them for lunch or a cup of tea.  I will call my sister and invite myself over and then diary it to do again two months later.  This is the only way I will see her, as she almost never calls me and I never have a strong enough urge to call her ‘naturally’.  Although I accept that we will probably never be close I feel bad about not seeing her, hence, the need to make a plan to do so.  Some family relationships are mostly based on duty but a cup of tea after work isn’t going to kill me, especially when I think of what other people do for their family members, even ones they don’t like.

So I have used a work type approach on some aspects and for others, a simple emotional one:  I like spending time with those people, I feel comfortable with them.  I want to see them more often than I have thus far.   It’s the balance between the planned and the unstructured, the disciplined scheduling and the intuitive, responsive spontaneity.  Between my plans and the cues and opportunities of the world around me.   So, what to plan and what to let unfold naturally?  Answer:  at every decision fork, simply be aware that there is that choice and then trust yourself to make it.  And if an area of life isn’t going too well, review it against these two ways of approaching it.

When I finished my memoir and came up for air, I noticed the house.  I finally got the bathroom redecorated after talking about it for months.  I began to notice other things that needed doing and got back into doing a bit more housework, honouring the home I am lucky enough to live in.   I still want to be a healer as much as ever, I still love the feeling of my hands heating* up if I just so much as think about it.  I was just on holiday, that’s all.   I will still swim and will probably begin to put a bit more effort in.  I am sure I will eat better and lose a little weight, naturally and without fuss or scales and not out of self loathing but out of sensible respect for health.

And my Love… well, if I had to imagine what he might want… it might be for me to be more content with where I am and not so restless and anxious for the next thing.  I said to him recently that it would be good to take drugs and it be just about fun and not about exploring the outer regions of my head and he said, Hallelujah I can’t wait for you to get there that’s what I’ve been like for ages.  I do feel fun flowing through me, especially when the kids are here; I feel like crawling around on all fours pretending to be a lion, or a gorilla, or making cat noises…   Is fun the final frontier?  I asked my husband.  He replied:  What else would there be?

He is reading a book about creating a simple life to hear God better; we debated that and came to the conclusion, as always, just live** life in your own way, in the way in which you feel closest to God.  For me:  in intense emotion, like after the funeral.  Flashes of happiness after doing a good day at work.  Being at a wedding reception and seeing all the people being so nice and friendly to my stepdaughter.  Driving home with her asleep in the passenger seat afterwards.  Seeing my son chat away to my husband and know that it was him he called when he needed some advice.  Just being quiet and alone in the house.  Life, basically.  And writing, knowing that I have this, this support system, that helps me work it all out as I go along…..

*My original Freudian slip typo said ‘hearting’ up.  Yes, heating up with love!

** And this one originally in another typo said ‘love’ rather than live, and I considered leaving it, as that is true too.

Postscript Re reading the above I note the following influences and experiences: a funeral, a book being read and discussed, attending a social event.  I needn’t have worried about my writing or about what to do next.  The lesson I take from the past few weeks is ‘participate in life and wait for inspiration to strike’.  

The Price of Freedom

Tags

family, India, stress

To paraphrase The Rolling Stones, you can ask for what you want, but you can’t control exactly how what you have asked for will be given to you.

So here I am, at last, finally, an independent adult.  Not beholden to my mother.

My mother gave me quite a bit of financial help with buying my house.  She also bought a woodburner for the house.  So I felt bad about wanting to give up my stressful career, sell up, downsize, go travelling, and return to live somewhere smaller, cheaper, simpler and with lower overheads so I could do a less stressful job.  It didn’t feel like it was solely up to me in the way that it would have been had I always been totally financially independent.

So it was with trepidation that I raised it with her and it took me a few conversations before I was able to clearly articulate what it was I wanted to do and stick to it.

The first time I brought up the subject of selling the house, I offered to give her her money back.  She said no, she didn’t want it.  She actually said she didn’t want me selling the house to raise money for travelling, she would give me money instead, as a kind of advance on my inheritance.

I said I didn’t want her to do that, that I had had enough money already, but she was very forceful.  With my mother, large sums of money can be talked about as if they were nothing, and without really talking about it.

So I went off agreeing to consider renting out the house instead, even though that wasn’t what I wanted to do, and she never actually mentioned the idea of giving me travelling money again.

So again I plucked up the courage to say I was selling the house, in order to raise money for travelling, and because I didn’t want to be a landlord for a property in the UK whilst I was in India.

My mother insisted that we could do the trip on the rental income alone, but even if there were no gaps in tenants and no problems like non payment or ruined carpets, I knew we couldn’t.  Plus it was never just about going travelling, it was a whole life re-set that I wanted.

Time went by, the house went on the market in December, and completed early March.  Although I knew she wasn’t happy about me selling the house, I had thought she had accepted it.  I popped in for cups of tea, she asked a few polite questions about our travel plans and gave me a rucksack.

And then at 10:06 on Monday, after I had texted her to let her know we had booked our flights and were leaving for our year long trip to India the following Monday, she called and asked for her money back.

One of the many lessons of all this is to communicate one’s feelings and expectations clearly and openly, especially when it comes to money.  But I am sure I am not the only person who has difficulties in this area, especially when dealing with a very powerful family member.

So here I am, at last, finally, an independent adult.  Not beholden to my mother.  Not living near my mother (India aside, the boat is three hours away). Completely free, even of her influence.

I used to feel boggy, awkward, inauthentic in her company.  Unknown.  Whereas with my husband I feel completely safe and totally accepted. Known.

It shouldn’t be a competition or a choice but my mother has made her disapproval of my husband clear.  He, who has made me so happy, who makes me so happy.  The implication being that he is after my money (when we met I had a small starter home with a mortgage, he had a narrowboat, we both worked full time, both worked really hard, both fulfilled financial responsibilities to our children.  I also very much resent the implication that no one could love me just for myself).

Our friends observe that we make each other very, very happy. We share the same values.  We have supported each other with everything for almost a decade.

In the middle of this bombshell, my friend H, a lovely ray of sunshine, came to stay on the boat for the night.  It was just what we needed, and distracted us through the worst.  After H left, we went into Northampton, found somewhere to eat using the Happy Cow app, over ordered from a delicious range of yummy vegan food and treats, and caught our breath.

In spite of everything, I felt relieved, even happy.  We both began to see it as a potentially positive event in our lives.

Maybe we needed it to be just us, so that we can find out just what we’re capable of.

Sanguine.
I thought it meant unruffled, calm and philosophical.
We looked it up, actually it means optimistic and positive, especially in an apparently bad or difficult situation.  Better, more ‘evolved’ than I realised.  I asked us, can we move from calm and philosophical to cheerful and optimistic?

I regard us as being in the middle of the continuum.  If at one end is me coming back from India and being able to say to my mother, Wow, what was all that about, can we talk about it?

Then at the other end is as my husband said, some people would beg and plead, What have I done, why, why.  Or get angry, refuse to give the money back.  Or cry.  Well that’s good, I said, and laughed, because I am definitely not doing any of those things.

So yes, maybe we are currently somewhere in the middle, and if we can move from my definition to the dictionary definition of sanguine, then I shall be very pleased.

Oh yes and by the way, we are flying to India on Monday!

Mera naam Rachel hai

Aapase milakar khushee huee

Follow me on Instagram followingthebrownrabbit.

Thank you for reading.

PS I have had very limited internet access since moving onto the boat and lots of travel related admin to do when I have, so I haven’t been reading many blogs.  I have still been thinking of you all though, and I wish my fellow bloggers and readers well.  Thank you for all your support xxx

 

Growing pains

Tags

escape the matrix, Life on a narrowboat, Minimalism, Narrowboat, Narrowboat living, Personal growth, stress, Voluntary simplicity

So it turns out that escaping the matrix isn’t as easy as I thought it would be. From our moving day being on one of the worst weather and travel conditions for decades to the water pipes springing a leak the first time we tried to have a shower on the boat, we are being tested at every step of the way.
Also, it takes time. It isn’t like just stepping through a portal and here we are in our new world, this is a transition. We are still processing and adjusting, finding our feet. With each new challenge we are growing, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t scary.
Which brings me onto platitudes, fridge magnets and movements. The image is actually a notebook. It is a cute present that I was given by my husband’s work colleagues and obviously I agree with the sentiment. Just like I agree with the minimalism, downsizing and voluntary simplicity movements. I enjoy reading an article in the dentist’s waiting room about someone who gave up a highly paid job in the city to open up an organic teashop as much as the next person.
But what these articles don’t tend to do is tell you how hard it is. Maybe magazines like to maintain a chirpy tone. Maybe the article has been written some time later so that, as with childbirth, the really bad bits have been forgotten.
I am doing this right now and I can tell you, fantastic as it is, it’s also difficult and scary. Having a lump of money and then immediately spending quite a lot of it when we’re not used to having or spending a lot, that’s scary. Moving into the Travelodge with one car in the car park full up with our stuff, and another car left outside the old house, also filled with our stuff, was a bit overwhelming. Having a leak and having to mend a pipe on the boat was stressful. Thinking about what we’re going to do when we get back from India and how will we manage financially (sign up to agencies, make enough to cover expenses, run one car). All of it is both scary and super exciting.
How we handle all the challenges is what is important. To look at it all as an opportunity for growth, and to accept everything as it is rather than hold onto the irrational hope that everything needs to be perfect all the time. We have to hold our nerve, and we have to keep going. That’s the real focus of the moment.
We have regretted a few of the things we got rid of, but no matter. If it was what we needed to do to get us here, then it was worth it. Previously, it was all about breaking down the old life. Now it is about building a new one. As I said before, the blog comes first, but I’m also writing to magazines, submitting work, writing a book with my husband, and generally taking my writing seriously and hoping that it can become part of what I do to earn money in this new world.
Do something your future self would be thankful for, another one of those platitudes. The platitudes and the sayings, they don’t really help, or rather they help as much as a fridge magnet can. They may inspire, but the doing of it, the action, and the dealing with the consequences of those actions, is all you.

What’s really good about living in a small space is that you can see everything all of the time. You don’t sit in one room and have to hold some other rooms in your mind at the same time. It’s all right there, in front of you. I am convinced that this takes up less mental energy and is beneficial.
Oh, and problems with the water meant that I washed my hair a day or two later than I’d have liked, over the sink using kettles. I used Faith in Nature natural shampoo and conditioner as the sink goes straight into the canal. It was a blissful experience and all the next day I couldn’t stop smelling my hair!

Thank you for reading
Rachel xxx