Tag: refuge

Familiar Fields

'A Poetic Potter & A Potting Poet'Leave a comment

First published 13 April 2020

Turning the corner, the familiar fields and shelters come into view.

Open outlook, clear and calm; this is the place where past harms are healed.

Friends, old and new, graze on at steady pace. It’s never too late for needs to be met
just a turn of fate.

The familiar fields and shelters will come into view again next year. The way ahead may not always be calm and clear, but we can always come back to this place, this sanctuary, and marvel at the donkeys, stroke the pony’s mane. It’s always different every year and every year, just wonderfully the same.

It’s around a year ago today that my friend, Rosemary, passed away. She was 49.

I wrote the above piece after we had been to visit an animal sanctuary in Norfolk. Rosemary had introduced me to the animal sanctuary because she had adopted a Shetland pony who lives there, Sampson.

I suggested we go and visit which we did, and revisited a few times more, before it got to the point where it was too much for Rosemary. She found it too tiring, she said, which it was. It was too tiring because she smoked heavily and was an alcoholic.

Rosemary had been diagnosed with schizophrenia in her early 20s.  While she never opened up much about her past or about anything emotional at all really – I was told in no uncertain terms to ‘leave it’ if I prompted her in any way – she did tell me once that the psychiatrist who diagnosed her told her that she would never work again.

That may well have been the case in the conventional sense of what constitutes ‘work’ in our society, but if it was unlikely that she would ever do regular paid work again, that prognosis could have been presented differently, to give Rosemary a sense of hope of having a fulfilling life, even if not the life that she would have been hoping for as a young woman in her 20s at that time.

In recent times there has been a lot of talk about mental health and a lot of awareness raising in the media, but when it fundamentally comes down to it, has anything significantly changed to ensure that people who have diagnoses of extreme forms of mental illness can find some way of identifying themselves with a meaningful role, a sense of positive purpose, in the world? I’m not convinced that it has. 

Some people are fortunate to be partners, wives, husbands, mothers, fathers, which can help to offset the stigma and isolation that accompanies their condition, but many – like Rosemary – do not.

Rosemary was not an easy person to get on with. She pushed people away, more often than not, and did make lifestyle choices – however hard and judgmental that sounds – that led to her limiting her own life in many ways.  But I have often wondered how different it would have been if, when given that diagnosis of schizophrenia all those years ago, she had been told about all the things that she could keep doing – and all the support that she would get in the process – to help her feel good about herself and her life, whatever form or path that took.

Having extra support at a critical time can make all the difference between us, on the one hand finding our own strength and resolve to come through with a sense of purpose and, on the other hand, wavering and floundering and – at best – just not drowning.

At times Rosemary pushed my patience to the limits and then some (and she knew it!), but I could only try and imagine what difficulties she went through every day. Somehow, through that diagnosis, and prognosis, and the position it placed her in, in the world, all her intelligence, her good memory, her dark sense of humour, her creativity, her kindness to animals and sense of fair play got devalued, not least by her.

Thank you for the friendship that we shared Rosemary.  For the times we spent at nature reserves and animal sanctuaries, the concerts we went to and the smile that you used to greet me with. 

I hope you are now flying high, with the birds.

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Help with Healing: Buddhism and Therapy
		
				

			 'A Poetic Potter & A Potting Poet'Leave a comment		

			


	

		






“Hand in hand to peace of mind”





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.