Pearls

These are memories and thoughts, disjointed and hung together here like a string of beads, each with their own fascination.

Alicia’s green eyes. Unusual, unique.

Watching the way Xavier moves, his little body propelled along by tiny jumps. The excitement in his limbs. The sound of his landings.

When Xavier looks at me sometimes I think he can just see how much I love him and his eyes look like they open up.

I once witnessed a ruffled sheet of cloud from above, through the toy window of an aeroplane, lit up by the light of the moon.

When I cook it is very rare for me to follow a recipe. If I’m making something I have never made before I’ll glance at the recipe and then take it from there. Each time I make a dish I tamper with it. I use my instincts a lot and consequently never make the exact same dish twice. To do anything else would, in truth, lose my interest.

Two angel white swans in magnificent, improbable flight passed me one afternoon as I jogged along the promenade. We both travelled a few meters together, alongside each other, before they out paced me and left me in complete adoration.

The first bumble bee of the year, the first ladybird, the first day that twelve daises grow beneath a single step.

Valentine

Do you know what I hate about depression most? It isn't the torture of living in my own head. It isn't the difficulty I have bringing myself to wash and dress. It isn't the fear I feel every time the telephone rings. It isn't the constant feeling of exhaustion. It is that yesterday, when Alicia looked at me, her eyes mirrored mine and I knew she could see and feel the love I have for her. Whereas today, those same eyes reflected back an emptiness. Alicia, the person I love and treasure more than anything,  would find it hard to feel that love through this depression. It is a wall between us.

I don't wish for much, not really. I want to wake before her and walk the dogs. Get the kettle on and cook her some breakfast. She deserves a little breakfast in bed. I want her to see me smiling at her in the morning, the way my heart is towards her. I'd lay her clothes on the radiator to warm, and brush her sleepy locks aside so that her eyes could feel the morning. She is a sleeping princess. We would talk about the day ahead just the way she likes to. It puts her at ease, she likes to know the shape of the day ahead. I want her to hold her close like my life depends on it and make plans together. Dream the future together. Joke about how many children we will have and giggle at what mischievous grandparents we'll make.

I found my Alicia and we fell in love. Depression takes me out of this body far away from her, from everybody. The empty shell left behind looks like me. Sometimes it even flickers back to life. But the rest of the time it is just an immovable weight between us. I am somewhere beyond those dark eyes. Out there somewhere. In distress. And through the windows of those eyes I watch her heart breaking. It breaks us both.

I'm trying to make it back to you Alicia. I'm trying to reach you my love.

When I Click My Fingers

The dots are there to be joined up. Many months ago Jojesek posted a really useful piece on Jon Kabat-Zinn’s mindfulness principles, listing the attitudinal aspects of the practice; it is well worth a read. Some months later I discovered The Four Agreements through a post by Teresa Evangeline. Again, this post is an interesting read and a good introduction to Don Miguel Ruiz’s tenants. Later still I discovered Les Floyd’s blog and was introduced to the way he was influenced by the book ‘The Power Of Now’ in his own journey.

I could feel some common silver threads were catching the light as I looked at Mindfulness, The Four Agreements, Cognitive Behaviour Therapy and Paul Gilbert's Compassion approach. All seemed to me to be suggesting that the mind was not something entirely under our control (thank goodness), but that it was also capable of quite unhealthy pursuits, and that we should protect ourselves from its less helpful behaviour.

The sorts of things my own mischievous mind can occupy itself with include: being overly self critical; judging myself and others unfairly; making unlikely assumptions about future events that I couldn’t possibly substantiate; making unhelpful assumptions about other people’s thoughts and motives; and filling my head with expectations of myself and my time. When depression has a hold over me, these are things that I think about and commentate on to the exclusion of all else. It is terribly introspective, but I am not responsible for it. I can’t be blamed for it. I am in the audience watching it all. It is a movie that makes me feel a certain way about myself, and one that makes me fear the world and everything in it. This is to be living in a dream, or rather a nightmare. All these thoughts, the past, the future, the interpretations – none of this is reality.

So I do agree; my thoughts need to be wrestled with. Or perhaps not so. Not wrestled with exactly, not fought until they are overcome…not reasoned away. Instead, my thoughts are something that should be filtered, managed, selectively rejected, at times ignored. Rather than colouring everything and even occupying their own reality, they should be tethered so that my other senses and reality itself has a chance to share the light.

So why is applying this wonderful filter so difficult? It is! It is very difficult for me! The answer would seem ‘pay more attention to my senses’, and yet I am a rabbit caught in the headlights of my own thoughts. I’m unable to move and one after the other they strike me down. I know what it is that needs to be done but I fail at it. Unsurprisingly, the commentary from within remarks that I am failing because I am not trying hard enough.

What I am trying to move towards in inhabiting the present moment. To a place where, when my thoughts wander off, I bring them back, and I am able to continually do that. So that my reality is the one I am actually inhabiting bodily, and not the warped reality I am creating inside. This is not easy. I am a complete novice at this. I am tired from all the thinking and distress, I am sleeping a lot, I am not taking care of myself. I spend a lot of time stuck in neutral. Days end before they have started. Anything unexpected is met with fear.

I am learning from Jon Kabat-Zinn and others that I will need to start my learning in the shallower waters, start small, work hard and practice often. That doesn't sound much like me, but as he says: “Your mind goes off, you bring it back, your mind goes off, and you bring in back, and this happens over and over and something inside you starts to grow that’s a little more interesting than a bicep.”

Out Of My Mind

The first time I had any contact with mindfulness was long ago when a counsellor I was then working with asked me to describe the short walk from my car to her home. As it happened I should have noticed the colour of the leaves on the trees, the freshly mown grass verges, the aroma of the lavender bushes loaded with bumble bees, the soft mats of moss in the cracks between the paving stones. I realised I had noticed none of these things and began to understand how depression had switched off all my senses so completely. My focus, concentration and energy were all expended internally on moments in my past or my future, and there was nothing left to sustain my other senses and take in the world around me.

On my most difficult days, I beg to escape the pressure of thoughts crowding my head.

The first time I tried meditating I used a simple technique that involved focusing on my breath moving in and out, focusing my attention on the feeling of its movement. My eyes were closed; I could feel myself breathing in my stomach and the air tickled gently through my nostrils. I focused on this repetitive and perpetual action. Inside my head a noise grew louder, the clumsy thoughts treading on this attempt at peace, at first just one or two but soon many competing thoughts chattering like an ugly morning chorus, a busy canteen of simultaneous and disjointed communication. This was my first real encounter with the ever present clattering of my busy mind. I am to understand that as we pass into a meditation, we become aware of our minds’ ever present activity and its power for distraction, before it quietens. But it was in that moment, when I was willing my senses to focus on my breathing, that I realised deeply that the mind was ‘other’. That it wasn’t the same as my will. That in that moment I was struggling against its activity. That it did not work for me. Even in the early stages of meditation this conjurer of thoughts was looking to join me. I could hear its incessant commentary, telling me about my breathing, about how I was meditating, about how well this all felt, and how amazing it all was! It is resistant to stillness.

The unruly mind. A mind that has turned on itself. The weight of rumination pulling me underneath the surface. The very hallmark of depression. Everything else, the lethargy, the withdrawal, the fear…devastating but mere side effects.

On my most difficult days, my unruly mind hounds me with a cruel lingering analysis of my every memory.

I don’t know anyone’s depression but my own. I couldn’t know any more. We all arrive in the therapist’s chair with our own pain. Every story is different. I know for me this unruly mind is my true adversary. I forgive myself the depression knowing that my genetics and childhood carved into me its possibility. I accept that it is to be lived with and managed, not overcome like cancer and not made a companion of. When the right triggers set in motion that characteristic rumination, the clouds of depression gather. Left unchecked, those winds gather momentum and strangle the season. And so begins my search into the many ways that generations and peoples have sought to bring the human mind to heel.