Tag: trust

Writing into Life

A few months ago I had high levels of anxiety which manifested in various ways.

I became highly stressed about my car, as I was having problems with the gears and I started to catastrophise about ‘worst case scenarios’, knowing the extent to which I need my car for daily walks with Lydia.

I pushed through on positives as best I could at the time, the worst-case scenario didn’t present itself and my car has been fine for a few months.

Recently, I’ve started having problems with the gears again.

In the intervening months I’ve taken a lot of time to rest and continue to practice meditation, yoga and Qigong.

I write my blog, in 28-day cycles. The process of writing is proving to be very therapeutic. I’ve written intermittently and irregularly for years but not in the same way as I do now.

My daily walks with Lydia have also been therapeutic, giving us both a good start to the day with regular exercise, fresh air and that all important connection with the natural world.  In Lydia’s case a lot of her connection is through her nose; for me it is more a sense of the air around me and the ground under my feet; the slow steady movement of walking.

This time I haven’t experienced high levels of anxiety about my car problems.  It’s been a minor inconvenience which Trev has helped me with by picking me up from the garage when I dropped it off this morning. It should be ready later this morning and may need a new clutch in the longer term. 

Anxiety, I’m sure, arises from past experiences when we’ve needed to address a problem, and haven’t been able – for whatever reason – to find and implement a solution; where everything fell apart and we had no help in finding ways to put things back together. We’ve learnt to ‘not cope’ and to retreat instead of establishing ways of knowing what to do and how.

When I was younger, I had none of the personal resources and resilience that I have now. I wasn’t taught any coping strategies as any assertion on my part would have upset the status quo, however uneasy that status quo was (and it most certainly was uneasy, at best).

However, through experience and reflection I’ve done my best to learn and change, to take responsibility for the things that make up day-to-day life and to see and do things differently.

I still rely on a small dose of anti-depressant medication every day, but the main processes I use are the ones that are active not passive.  Moving from passive to active has been the major achievement of my life.  The mental effort it has taken has been enormous and sustained, which is why, at the moment, I need to rest a lot as well.  Re-focusing and re-prioritising takes time and I need to continue to trust in the process, however frightening the prospect of uncertainty may seem. I’ve come a long way, just in the last few months. I’m not going back now.