Tag: mental-health

An experience for its own sake.

I’ve always been, and at one point realised, that I am a person who loves watching at the clouds in a sky – early autumn afternoon seems to be a sweet spot. Something about how the clouds can give scale and perspective in an otherwise plain blue sky, how they can reveal the scale and the vastness of what lies above the line of our horizon. This third dimension that clouds can introduce to a rather plain sky is something that seems i haven’t managed to ever wrap my head around – the beauty and the awe i feel from it.

An afternoon drive this Friday coming back home from the beach house, with a perfect sky full of clouds, of movement and structures, made me feel like a little kid in a toy store, feeling the urge to make everything mine by taking pictures, risking my safety in how I drive for an opportunity to capture this beauty, the contrasting colours, the vastness of the clouds, the perfect light. It was so stimulating and at the same time so overwhelming and made me think ‘have I ever experienced this before?’, ‘can I stop trying to find ways to limit this experience and how I am feeling by taking a photo but rather just to experience it?’. After a few seconds of managing to quench that thirst and calm down from all the visual stimulation I thought, oh this is a topic I could write about in my blog. Surely this experience being so intense albeit not new in some ways will be able to inspire me to express myself, to draw insights, to present and eventually conclude on something. But the more I am thinking about it, including reflecting on it with the help of chatgpt’s superior processing power, the more I realise that an insight or conclusion is not something I have at this moment and would be something forced, something fake even.

What I can say however is that I have caught myself in the last few months, maybe even long before that (imperfect memory skewing the data here), being able or being in a position of appreciating the calmness, the peacefulness and the beauty of things, of how the light and the wind can transform or elevate the visual experience I was getting from looking at a palm tree, at the lemon tree in our back yard. Can I say that this has to be due to more mental space that I can notice smaller, simpler things? Am I becoming wiser and more open to what’s happening around me and somehow manage to nourish myself and ‘brighten’ my day? I cannot say for sure. What I can say is that I’ve been consciously aware of experiencing such beauty more and more lately, a beauty that my brain reflexively wants to assign a meaning to, to create a lesson learned from and to use this stimulation to alchemically turn into kinetic energy, into creative productivity to record a guitar piece, write in my blog. It definitely often feels, by the way, that posting a photo on instagram is not enough of a direction to release this energy.

So what I’m left is with the experience itself, not being able to turn the stimulation and dopamine into more stimulation and maybe that’s a lesson in itself. To be present enough and courageous enough to experience things in that moment as they are, through eyes, not through screens, and let my body to be nourished from it.

This peace.

This peace I feel is the absence of highs, the absence of lows, the new ‘makes me feel alive’ kind of state that reminds me that this is not to be taken for granted, that my good health and painless experience is all I can wish for – a foundation that is sought out and once it arrives, it seems it always was here, waiting patiently until I became sober from all the chronic and instant troubles, to reveal itself.

This peace, this stillness, asks for nothing more than presence. It is a mirror for what I’ve always been – no performances, no justifications, no promises, no hopes and no fears – everything is exactly where it should be. Despite the courage and strength that this peace unveils, I hear reluctant whispers that can become much bolder if I indulge in the thoughts they provoke: “How can I make the best out of this state?” asks the productive self wanting to control the outcome and put lightning in a bottle. “Surely, this will not last. It is not sustainable.” says the self that has been conditioned to believe that good things are meant for other people and that good times are just good luck, a candle light flickering before it dies – a short-lived warmth.

But, this peace starts to feel like a new home, a home that I will not be asked to move out from or be told that I don’t have the means to maintain. I will be audacious enough to accept this new reality because maybe I deserve it – maybe the soil is fertile enough, accepting enough, of the goodness, of the compassion and of the kindness I have in me, that I can start offering to others because I have offered it first to myself.

This peace is a privilege and a blessing – a state that I’ve allowed myself to deserve.

False alarm.

I am alone as it happens to be, this evening. Not a rare phenomenon, but one that seems to grab my attention, because of the hopes and the fears that it encourages. Allowing yourself to be alone, without constant distractions in the various forms they come in creates a space that you can inhabit, alone, let the inner voice find its own pace and rhythm, to alert you, to inform you, to communicate with you of what is here and what is not. Of course what we call as being alone is a state or a perception that can be embodied in the most secluded areas and in the most buzzing and crowded spaces – what you do with it and how welcoming you are of it may decide how revealing and how nourishing it can be for you.

For me, this aloneness has lately been, in many cases, filled with a longing, a pulsating inner voice that I’ve learned to associate with the inner child in me and more specifically to the child that just needs acknowledgment, having been conditioned for so long to be ignored, suppressed or mistook for being a personality pattern or a signal and an urgency for coming to the conclusion that things have to change, that I need to move, that I need to act, that I am in danger. Well, lately and more consciously these past couple of days, I’ve been naive and simple enough to just put my hand between my chest and stomach, sometimes a hand on my neck in a compassionate way, in an understanding way, in a ‘I know, I know, I can see you, I can hear you, I’m here’ kind of way, having the hope that this would be adequate or enough in relieving the stress, the worry, the concern of where I am, what I’m doing, who I’ve come to be and to eventually rewire the conditioning that this voice is necessary to alert me and to remind me.

While the inner voice can guide us in many ways and convey messages that we should listen to, this ‘longing’ voice turns out to be adequately acknowledged and soothed, even for a short period of time, with this simple touch, warmth and compassion. What initially can be mistaken as an incoming emotional storm, sounding the alarm for the closest self-soothing mechanism you can get your hands on, moments after it shows its true face, as the voice that just needs a bit of your time. This voice, that now that I’m noticing, is showing its head more frequently now, or only now I’ve become conscious of its presence and its intention, is now more than welcome to come and hang whenever. I’ll be here waiting for it for whenever the need arises, saving the seat next to me just for that voice, with an eagerness to hear all about it and to return a warm smile to reassure that everything is going to be just fine and that it should visit more often.

No need for a ‘why?’ or a ‘how?’.

I feel tired, at the end of the day, sitting in front of my laptop, inspired by the dream of cutting through performative, defensive and pretentious thoughts and finally allowing my true unfiltered self to express itself – here, now. Consciousness talking about itself feels already performative and pretentious. Seating down writing a draft meant for my blog is already something that under brief examination appears to be diluting the sincerity of what i write and the attempt for genuine expression. What should my compass be? What am i aiming for here? To express a need, an unspoken truth, a suppressed desire? I guess profound sounds like something that it should be, unforced should also be somewhere in the mix. So here i go:

Should I walk? Should i run? Should i ‘hack’ my way into a state of stillness where the limbic system feels unnecessary? Should I get so tired that my body takes over my brain and forces it to comply? No more nagging I say to my sensitive, emotional and intuitive self. Enough with your hyper-vigilance, looking over your shoulder as if someone with a knife will stab you in the ribs. When have you ever been attacked in such a way that such fears even exist? What has happened so frequently to you and in which environments did you frequent that you now feel that at any point in time someone will scheme against you, someone will discredit you or deem you unworthy of their time and attention? How insensitive and inadequate where your caregivers during your younger years? What made you feel that voicing your needs would not be a solution to your fears and concerns? Why did you turn to disappointment, despair and eventually bitterness and resentment? These questions are part acknowledgment and validation of my fears but they are also judgment and shaming. If only I had a time machine – a streaming platform to watch Season 5, episode 3 where my mother ignored my cries for attention and warmth. But I don’t. And I don’t need to understand, I don’t need to know, I don’t need any other reason or proof to know that I should help the child in me up. The child that looks inconsolable, the child that scraped their knee after a fall and had his wounds untended for too long now. I don’t need to know why and how – what caused the fall or what the child could do to avoid it – all that’s needed is a warm hug, a ‘there-there’, a ‘let’s go home, i’ll fix you some soup’. And that is what I need right now – love, care and to be compassionate with myself. In the face of open wounds and aching the warmth of acceptance and compassion is all that will ever be needed. Just stay with him now – tell him everything is going to be okay – and see the child’s smile return, a flower bloom and with a face full of sun see his future with optimism and grace. But for now just be there and be present – the child needs it and you need it too.