Embody Mental Health

Life. Don't Just Survive, Thrive

Posts Tagged ‘metaphor’

21.5.800 Challenge Continues …and so do I.

June 23rd, 2010

“Opposition is a natural part of life. Just as we develop our physical muscles through overcoming opposition – such as lifting weights – we develop our character muscles by overcoming challenges and adversity.”

STEPHEN R. COVEY

I am very happy with Bindu Wiles new post today over at her blog and her wave of creative zen she has been perpetuating with her 21.5.800 Challenge which has been (to my great joy) extended! In the vein of extending I am trying a new plight to post daily. That means 7 days a week. Even if one day is lighter than the next I want to be able to be consistent in the mayhem of life with posts and with post themes. I am, with this 7 day a week dedication, have decided to try out a new format which I have been mulling over for a few months-days of the week themes. I am actually very excited. It is both like the writing exercise of a writing prompt and a motivation and clarification of what is important to me to cover on this blog moving forward into the next 100 posts and beyond! I would love to hear your feedback on the new formula.

I am very excited about this personal challenge as well as continuing with Bindu’s wonderful 21.5.800 Community of Challenging. If you have an interest in joining go to her site to join in the fun (yoga, writing, and challenge, oh my): www.binduwiles.com . I will be beginning the 7 day format by the 4th of July weekend.

I would begin sooner but I am in the process of becoming an impromptu foster mama of another abandoned puppy (beagle baby we have named Gambit–like X-Men), quitting my job (last day is next week), dealing with some revisiting by my endometriosis and her pain (grr), and working on some fun projects…including fiddling with a new look and new features for this site! So, please look for the new format beginning July 4th weekend and some interesting updates and posts coming up in the interrum…including a potential expose on Mr. Gambit with the cutest smile and quite the bounce in his leaps.

I have found that life has given me ample opportunity for facing challenges lately. Some I have faced with grace, some with panic, some with anger, and some with great clarity. I appreciate them all (often in retrospect) and I am glad to give myself space and room to stretch and grow. In this blog and in my life. What ways are you able to stretch and grow heading ahead in life and into your summer? Sometimes we forget to challenge ourselves and often that is when we need it most and when life gives us unexpected presents in the form of life’s confrontations. This has definitely been the last few months for me. What will be next?

CHECK OUT THE NEW BLOG SITE FORMAT BELOW.

MONDAY: Trauma, Eating Disorders, & Addictions: A Clinical Vantage Point w/a Personal Bent on Surviving & Thriving

TUESDAY: Creative Expressions: Letting Art Inform Your World View (art, dance, writing, reading, music, etc.)

WEDNESDAY: Animals: Relationship, Metaphor, & Musings on the Furry World

THURSDAY: Yoga: Finding Ways to Embody Health in Life

FRIDAY : 10 Things: Life Perspectives in List Format

SATURDAY: Bliss & Rejuvenation: Self-Care, Reprieves, and Finding Room to Breathe

SUNDAY: Faith: Spirituality, Contemplation, & Ritual in A Healthy Life Sphere

**INTERVIEWS will be inserted in the place of daily content when new ones come to fruition. I hope to have many more wonderful interviewees to come.**

Posted in addiction, chronic illness, creative therapies, horses, life musings, spirituality, trauma | Tags: 21-5-800 Challenge, addiction, animals, art, Bindu Wiles, bliss, eating disorders, expression, metaphor, rejuvination, therapy, trauma |

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Finding Balance: In Headstands & In Life

January 30th, 2010

Happiness is not a matter of intensity but of balance and order and rhythm and harmony.

Thomas Merton

Thomas Merton, who also wrote the book of essays entitled No Man Is An Island, wrote with such clarity and certitude it is hard to argue with the above statement or the one in the title of his short stories. I have often had a problem trying to defy both of his certainties in my life–living life in intensity rather than balance and in solitary defiance rather than union with all. I have gotten better as I age, and learn, and read more of the wisdom of people like Merton, but somehow the roots of my old patterns seem to rear their ugly heads just when I think I am dissolving them. Like in HEADSTANDS.

Headstands are the symbolic and literal depiction of balance. If you are out of balance you may be able to hide it in a shoulder stand or even a tree pose but somehow the headstand always knows. And I am a flunkie of the headstand barometer of balance. I fall, I flop, I roll out, and crumple up. Fear, indecision, uncertainty, and lack of personal balance all come falling onto the floor with me and leave me feeling bare. I am brutally aware of my faltering points in headstand, or rather not-in-headstand, in a way that somehow I can ignore in the world off the mat.

But the headstand knows–and it towers over me in mockery of what I cannot yet do. Let go enough to just give over to the unknown. Find centeredness at my inner core unshakable even when the world topples on its head and flips upside down. But I am working on it and I breathe and release and try again, lifting off the mat for a moment before crumbling down again.

I may be floppy and fumbling and anything but graceful but I persist. And one day, hopefully sooner than later, I will lift off with confidence and equilibrium–proving that even when the world flips 180 degrees I can stand firmly on my head and face it.

HAVE A WONDEFUL, BALANCED , & CENTERED WEEKEND!

Posted in creative therapies, life musings, spirituality, yoga | Tags: balance, centeredness, harmony, headstand, inner core, life, metaphor, mockery, symbolic, Thomas Merton, yoga |

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Horses & Finding Freedom

January 28th, 2010

“A horse loves freedom, and the weariest old work horse will roll on the ground or break into a lumbering gallop when he is turned loose into the open.”

Gerald Raferty

Monday mornings at work are always a swirl of mystery, magic, and surprises. I suppose this is bound to be the case in beginning my work week at a Therapeutic Riding Center. The facility I run my Equine Facilitated Psychotherapy group out of is a quiet nook of the world on a sandy dirt road edging a canal ravine. I don’t know if anyone else does this on this particular stretch of street but I find myself glancing down at the murky green waters waiting to see round, black alligator eyes peering up at me. The center itself is vast acreage lined with white wooden fences and a crisp white barn that houses 16 or so horses. Monday mornings are reserved just for my group and the cleaning crew, inmates from a local prison facility. It is an interesting mix of life–horses in stables, convicts driving small tractors, and my little group of trauma survivors working with their equine counterparts. In its surreality it is quite freeing and outside of social norms and constructs. We are dancing a dance that is part magic, part illusion, and yet more real than most that life has to offer. Something in horses brings real to the surface and pushes out all the tedium and strife that are found outside stable gates. Horses, like yoga, strip life away to its naked essence and allow for us to breathe in the moment and leave everything else behind.

This particular Monday morning I was absurdly alert and reflective, still lingering on my 5am wake up, 6am meditation and the lack of television, radio, and all superfluous noise in my life. My mind was paradoxically more quiet and more active than it normally is on any given Monday. In that I mean that my brain had omitted a lot of the white noise from conscious thought and in its place was an awakened clarity and sharpness that I guess is the result of having been up for hours and having meditated to start my day.

Suddenly, I heard a loud thunk and vocal commotion and turned around the side of the barn to see a white mare galloping off through the back of the stalls. I see a correctional officer, the guardian of the inmates, standing baffled and amused holding the chain latch of the horse’s stall. “I can’t believe it, she chewed through the damn thing again. That is the second time she has done that,” he said and kept repeating it as if he could not imagine such tenaciousness in a horse. An older inmate standing next to me, and dressed in his working blue cotton uniform, looked in my eyes and said, “She just wants that freedom, you can see it in how she’s running.” He stared after her, mesmerized, as the last bit of her white mane disappeared around the corner and I looked over at him wondering if he knew how profoundly metaphoric his statement had just been.

Here stood a man who was living in a world that was predominantly caged and in the one place in his week where he was given freedom, space, clean country air, and equine surroundings. And as he watched this white mare’s dedicated effort to break free of her cage I could feel, in my proximity to him, his understanding of her yearning. And in them both I saw a moment of magic–connection between human and horse and metaphor from the stables into the world. It was one of those moments you want to bottle both miraculous, soulful, joyful, and sorrowful. The smile on the inmate’s face lingered as he turned from the horse and went back to his shovel, back to his work, and back into the mind of a man who understood the yearning to be free.

In that moment I shared with both of them, before the white mare was brought back to her stall, I saw a sliver of that man and a glimmer of that horse, and both of their natural longing to be free in the world–the way they once were. Some days, especially lately, juggling worlds upon worlds, I feel like maybe I am overloaded and completely insane in my juggling efforts. On days like Monday I am grateful for the world I live in, the life I have, and the honor I feel in being able to work in a way that facilitates moments like these–spontaneous and amazing.

Posted in creative therapies, horses, life musings, spirituality, trauma, yoga | Tags: freedom, horses, human, inmate, magical, mare, metaphor, nature, prison, surreality, therapeutic riding center, therapy, trauma survivor |

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Welcome!

I am a trauma therapist and survivor of trauma. I believe in the potential in all of us not just to survive but thrive in living. I am yoga practitioner and teacher, writer and reader, animal lover and animal-assisted therapist. I believe for every challenge the world hands us we are also given a solution; sometimes subtle and other times clearly shown. The hope of this site is to bring a tiny piece of hope to anyone searching for it and maybe light a spark that will continue to burn in each person's recovery from pain and return to the truest part of the self.

Embody Mental Health, is not a medical or psychiatric organization. The information contained on this site is solely for the purpose of providing general information, resources, & discussion about issues of mental health, wellness, & healing. Your own treatment of any issues of mental health, illness, and recovery process therein should incorporate the guidance of trained mental health/medical professionals.