I’m taking some time out this weekend – just me and Lydia – to rest and recharge. I knew I’d run out of steam and, after a bit of searching on #airbnb, found a super dog-friendly place just a couple of hours drive away.
It’s a small, converted barn, built in the 19th century and perfect as a peaceful retreat.
I don’t have a coherent plan about what to do while I’m here but it involves eating, drinking, sleeping and catching up on a few things.
There is a secure grassy area so I can let Lydia out whenever she wants.
Yesterday she had a walk in the morning as usual, then I took her to a secure dog park near where we live #poochiepark before we set off to come here. Tomorrow we’re booked into a park near the barn #littlepaddocks. So today it’s a pj day for me.
I think Lydia is OK with this arrangement – she looks pretty chilled to me.
For many years of my life, I struggled to find any sense of identity, direction, purpose or path.
I didn’t know why this was the case, or what to do to change it. It took many years of jumping in at the deep end – particularly with relationships. I hadn’t known how to form them or make emotional connections of any kind when I was younger, and eventually I knew that I had somehow to kick-start my life into action if I was going to have any kind of life at all.
Two divorces, another failed relationship, a shipwreck of a business venture and extreme bullying in the workplace led to me having a breakdown in all aspects when I was in my late thirties.
This included having what was described later by a psychiatrist as a ‘psychotic episode’. The psychotic episode followed a period when I was desperately trying to be as positive as possible about a situation that was too much to bear. Afterwards, my brain went ‘clunk’, ‘clunk’, ‘clunk’ down into the depths of depression and I have spent much of the last 25+ years training my brain to come to terms with the past and think differently about the present and future.
In my desperate state, running on survival instinct at best, I began to realise that I was very much not alone; that many people were struggling with many different difficulties, and when I could I reached out to help them too. I decided at one point that, knowing I was going to feel crap inside for a very long time, at least if I did ‘stuff’ along the way, I’d know that I hadn’t just done nothing.
After doing loads of different kinds of voluntary work and then part-time paid work, I was able to start a full-time job again and sustain myself in that for the next 14 years. By that time, I’d learnt to prioritise, and I concentrated on work to the exclusion of most other things. Working and resting didn’t offer much scope for a personal life, but it was my way of getting through. At one point I decided that, if I could achieve nothing else in life, I would make sure that my cat, Bertie, had a good one. It felt like that was enough, and I do believe it was. At that time, that was my purpose in life.
Who is to say what is important in this world and what isn’t? In finding my own priorities I finally started to find my own path. Not a well-trodden one, and not one without trip-ups and tricky spots along the way, but mine.
I was eventually able to start and maintain a fulfilling relationship and my life is continuing to open up in ways that I could never have imagined possible when I was so aimless and adrift.
I continue to prioritise on a day-to-day basis, often on things that may not seem important to other people, but they are precious to me. My purpose is to make the most of things that come my way, the everyday, the challenges, the opportunities to engage – with others, with household tasks, with being creative or being quiet.
Home now after an afternoon at the pottery studio and a tea of fish, chips and curry sauce.
Lydia had been on her own all afternoon but while I was out – on the way to the studio – I stopped off and stocked up on dental chews and some gravy bone biscuits for her.
I held off giving her a dental chew until after she’d had her tea, so that she could get the best benefit from the cleaning effect, although the raw chicken wing that she had as part of her tea will also have helped.
Slightly disappointed that pots I’d hoped to pick up today were still in the kiln, I continued to work on others. I applied oxides and a spray of transparent glaze to one piece, and finished making two others, placing them on the shelf for bisque firing, once they have fully dried out.
So, overall, it was a constructive afternoon in good company, including that of my friend, Jenny, who I have a particularly close connection with. We both started going to the studio at around the same time, heading towards our respective 7th decades. Jenny’s enthusiasm knows no bounds; she is full of ideas and energy, always trying different things and quick to give encouragement to others including me.
I’m hoping for another good sleep tonight. We shall see. I inadvertently bought an arctic iced coffee at the petrol station while topping up with petrol, momentarily forgetting about my ‘no coffee’ and ‘no caffeine in the afternoon’ routine. I’m fairly confident it won’t have an adverse effect and I’ll be able to enter the ‘land of nod’ tonight. Funnily enough, there is a signpost to ‘The Land of Nod’ on the way to the pottery studio. I must remember to look it up one day.
It was wrapped up in special packaging: a teaching and meditation morning at a Buddhist centre.
The teaching carried in it a message that helped me to put to rest something that I’d been struggling with for decades.
I’d thought, for a long time, that I would never be able to put right mistakes that I’d made in the past because they were too big; too major. I thought that I’d fallen and failed early on in my life and all my efforts to rebuild had failed too. Despite doing my best to push through on positives for a long time, it had never been enough.
Then, suddenly, there it was, in the teaching that morning. It was possible for me to put the past behind me and be happy in the present. All I had to do was develop a calm and peaceful mind.
That teaching gave me hope, when I needed hope, and I’ve been building on it ever since.
That doesn’t mean that I am suddenly happy and joyful all the time. You don’t go through a lifetime of struggling with complex mental health and emotional difficulties without that struggle alone taking its toll. But I now allow myself to feel lighter, have stopped berating myself, stopped feeling responsible for everything that goes ‘wrong’ or has gone ‘wrong’ in the past.
For a long time, friends have told me that I deserved to be happy, but there was something so badly hurt, and at such a deep level, that it’s taken a long, long time for that place of hurt to be finally exposed to a point of healing, and for that healing to start taking place.
Tonight is a meeting of the Buddhist group that I go to, which is an outreach from the Centre that I went to last year[i].
I’ve already had a good day today, and I have that to look forward to this evening.
I first heard about affirmations over 30 years ago, when I came across the Louise Hay book, ‘You Can Heal Your Life’. (Hay House, 1984)
Affirmations have helped me in my healing process, although I’ve had to do a lot of other things as well.
The affirmation that I connected with at that time was: “I am the love and beauty of life in all its manifestations.”
I didn’t feel like I was the love and beauty of life in any of its manifestations, but I kept saying it to myself, over and over again.
I’d had some persistent warts on my thumb for years and found no lotions or potions that did anything to get rid of them. They disappeared though, shortly after I started using this affirmation.
Coincidence? Maybe, but I don’t think so. The power of positive thinking is not to be underestimated, in my view. And my view does tend to be aligned with a lot of other views, including those embedded in Buddhist teachings.
During the Covid crisis, my affirmation of choice was, “I choose to be peaceful and calm; everything is unfolding as it should”. Some people laughed at me when I told them about this at the time, but it did help me to stay calm during Covid, even if I did go through some very ‘not so calm’ periods later.
Today, I am saying the Louise Hay affirmation, and also another that I came across online:
“My knee is healing and getting stronger, each passing day.”
I don’t have too much of a problem with my knees, at the moment, but they are a weak point for me, so I do exercises that a physio taught me, take a one-a-day vitamin and mineral supplement for joints, apply some ‘wear & tear’ lubricating fluid that I bought from the chemist, and say the affirmation.
I need my knees to be functioning and flexible so that I can keep walking and working with Lydia.
We go on our woodland walk this morning.
On the narrow path across the field, between growing crops, Lydia’s nose nudges the backs of my knees, but the lead is looser than it was the last time we did this walk. She seems much more relaxed, and this continues as we emerge from the field and start along the grassy path beside the wood. I do a few ‘about turns’ as I need to but she pulls very little. We make our way through the wood, which has a warm dampness about it from yesterday’s rain, heating up now with today’s sun.
At one point during our walk, Lydia looks up at me, mouth open as if she is smiling, and I think that she is telling me that she isn’t as afraid as she used to be. She is still alert to sights, sounds, smells, but she isn’t pulling away from me. I feel like we are more ‘together’ on this walk, today. Every so often I reinforce the “heel” command, using some dried food from her daily allowance, mixed with some treats to give extra value to her reward for being a “good girl”. I haven’t brought cooked chicken with me this morning; I’ll use that tonight when we have our evening training time.
Home and, after giving Lydia the rest of her breakfast allowance in her favourite food ball – which she pushes around with her nose to get access to the dried food pellets that I put inside – I get my own breakfast. It’s a late one and I have a busy afternoon planned.
For much of last year I had what I referred to as ‘Wellbeing Wednesdays’ because I used to take Lydia for a walk first thing, then go to a yoga class, then go for a psychotherapy session at 1pm, then, after taking Lydia out for another walk in the afternoon, go to a Buddhist teaching and meditation session in the evening.
Now I have ‘Mental Health Mondays’, with yoga and Qigong in the afternoon.
Qigong isn’t as well known as yoga, and I find both beneficial for both my physical and mental health. I wrote a blog post about Qigong a while back:
It’s good to be on the receiving end of congratulations, and to feel good about the publication of my book. I used to think that I could never feel good about anything to do with myself again. Now I can, and I do.
Although I’ve previously described myself as a poetic potter and a potting poet, I don’t think that is really the case. They are two separate outlets for expression.
There’s nothing wrong with that, and the two may never combine or get closer. But there’s a part of me that wishes I could find a way of integrating the two, to some extent at least.
At a potter’s fair recently, where I had set up a stand, I sold a small piece – a box that I had made out of solid clay and put through the raku-firing process – to a lady called Lynne.
Lynne was really encouraging about my work, and she also invited me to join a poetry group.
I had some inner resistance as I’ve been struggling with my mental health and know that I need to have time to rest and not over-commit. However, Lynne’s enthusiasm was inspiring and it turned out that the group met only a few miles away from where I live. So I went along to a meeting.
I’m so glad that I did.
There were just five of us there and each of us read poems that we’d written. We were able to give feedback to each other if we wanted, but there was no pressure. It was relaxed, informal and supportive.
The theme for the meeting was ‘Highlight’ and I’d written a poem – my first in ages – which I read out:
Highlight
The highlight of the holiday was your choosing of the story; one that I'd read to you before
It's a story that opens the door to a memory of what hasn't been; days unseen; and brings to life the clue about what to do in days to come - more highlights - and maybe after all nothing left undone.
Sometimes it can be hard to open ourselves up to new possibilities when we’re still coming to terms with grief about the past and/or dealing with prevailing difficulties in the present.
I don’t yet know how my work with words and my work with clay are going to come together directly, if at all, but it’s good to work creatively with words again, as well as with clay.
It amazes me that the Buddhist religion, rooted in the East, is so accessible to me here in the West, in the UK.
“Dharma” is the teaching and “sangha” is the community. I’ve taken refuge in Buddha, dharma and sangha recently and will continue to do so, as it helps me to see things differently, train my mind, start to feel calmer about things that have been profoundly distressing.
Sometimes in life it can feel like we’re faced with an impossible situation. ‘Fight’ or ‘flight’ – the reflex responses – seem like the only options and neither of these provides a way forward. But if we can start to see a problem as an opportunity – something that we can grow with rather than get angry about or run away from, there is potential for a way forward to open up after all.
This isn’t something that I’ve found easy, not now and certainly not when I was younger.
I’ve gone into flight mode at critical times in my life because I just didn’t have the skills or insights, confidence or support to help me do it differently.
I used to struggle to assert myself in any way and used to get it horribly wrong, with disastrous consequences in terms of life choices and relationships.
I was in my late thirties when I discovered Buddhism at around the same time as I found out that I could turn to a counsellor for therapeutic support.
I haven’t always found that Buddhism and personal therapy are comfortably aligned. In some ways they have seemed to me to work from opposite polarities – Buddhism teaches that I give up ‘self-cherishing’ and therapy helps me to learn to love myself (with great difficulty). However, my approach has been to not over-think, take from each what they offer and do my best to move forward in more positive ways. It’s an ongoing journey, still fraught with trials and traumas.
I’ve worked through – cried, ached and screamed through – a lot of emotions over the last 30 or so years. There were some, though, that I put to the back of my mind, locked away because they were too difficult to deal with and I had to find a way of building a life for myself rather than staying stuck. Those locked away emotions do, however, have a way of finding their way out, demanding to be addressed because they be need to be resolved. That happened when I retired.
So I’m now at the point where I’m engaging with both therapy and Buddhism again. Except now they don’t feel so polarised. I just feel very lucky to have access to all the wisdom and wonder of Buddhist teachings from the East here in the West, as well as skilled therapy, that will help me to heal, and to make the most of the life that I have.
For many years of my life I struggled to find any sense of identity, direction, purpose or path.
I didn’t know why this was the case, or what to do to change it. It took many years of jumping in at the deep end – particularly with relationships. I hadn’t known how to form them, or make emotional connections of any kind when I was younger, and eventually I knew that I had somehow to kick-start my life into action if I was going to have any kind of life at all.
Two divorces, another failed relationship, a shipwreck of a business venture and extreme bullying in the workplace led to me having a breakdown in all aspects when I was in my late thirties.
This included having what was described later by a psychiatrist as a ‘psychotic episode’. The psychotic episode followed a period when I was desperately trying to be as positive as possible about a situation that was too much to bear. Afterwards, my brain went ‘clunk’, ‘clunk’, ‘clunk’ down into the depths of depression and I have spent much of the last 25+ years training my brain to come to terms with the past and think differently about the present and future.
In my desperate state, running on survival instinct at best, I began to realise that I was very much not alone; that many people were struggling with many different difficulties, and when I could I reached out to help them too. I decided at one point that, knowing I was going to feel crap inside for a very long time, at least if I did ‘stuff’ along the way, I’d know that I hadn’t just done nothing.
After doing loads of different kinds of voluntary work and then part-time paid work, I was able to start a full-time job again and sustain myself in that for the next 14 years. By that time I’d learnt to prioritise, and I concentrated on work to the exclusion of most other things. Working and resting didn’t offer much scope for a personal life, but it was my way of getting through. At one point I decided that, if I could achieve nothing else in life, I would make sure that my cat, Bertie, had a good one. It felt like that was enough, and I do believe it was. At that time, that was my purpose in life.
Who is to say what is important in this world and what isn’t? In finding my own priorities I finally started to find my own path. Not a well-trodden one, and not one without trip-ups and tricky spots along the way, but mine.
I was eventually able to start and maintain a fulfilling relationship and my life is continuing to open up in ways that I could never have imagined possible when I was so aimless and adrift.
I continue to prioritise on a day-to-day basis, often on things that may not seem important to other people, but they are precious to me. My purpose is to make the most of things that come my way, the everyday, the challenges, the opportunities to engage – with others, with household tasks, with being creative or being quiet.
Glad About 
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