Embody Mental Health

Posts Tagged ‘passion’

I would hurl words into this darkness and wait for the echo, and if an echo sounded, no matter how faintly,  I would send other words to tell, to march, to fight, to create a sense of hunger for life that gnaws in us all.                                              byRichard Wright, American Hunger, 1977

The ex-English Major in me wants to deconstruct this sentence from start to finish.  Every word, every comma, every part of it’s structure is dripping with boldness and defiance.  It makes me want to get out of my chair and take action.  What action?  I don’t know but the potency inspires.  Just me? Ok.  So, I can get a little excited and emphatic about words.  That has always been the case.  Since early readings of LM Montgomery’s prose by my mother before I could utter full sentences I have been incited to action by words and brought more alive and bold in my own life by words I have read on a page.  I have dug in with my fingers to the prose and come out invigorated.  Just me again? Maybe.

But there is something about the creative experience, both imbibing it and creating it, that is profound and brings to life our own lives and living worlds to even greater vibrance than before we explored it through the lens of creativity.  Whether painter, scupltor, woodworker, photographer, writer,  or needlepointer there is osmething about the experience of art (creating or absorbing) that makes us be present, be in the now, and explore our own inner landscapes in new ways and to greater depths.  We mine ourselves and our world and up comes something, as Richard Wright states, that is worth saying.  And, as he describes, with every bit we create, every word that we write, even the tiniest reverberation draws us forward to create more and speak louder onto the page or the canvas or film.

Writing has been in my veins ever since I picked up my first pencil.  I had dreams of writing a novel when I was still scribbling on those giant pads with dotted lines in elementary school.  When I went through my traumas in my late teens and suffered for years with PTSD I stopped writing.   My inner landscape had gone numb and I lost myself.  Without the reflection of the word or the will to pick up a pen and speak I had no way to reflect back to myself who I was.  My voice had always been first in paper and then outloud.  When I came crawling out of PTSD years later I had to rediscover me–both in life and on the page.  Who was I? What was my voice? What did I have to say?  My writing life was so imbedded in my “self” and definition of self that I had to rediscover my voice on the page to know what I wanted to say in my life.

I wrote yesterday about empowerment and for me writing has been my voice, my picket sign, my empowerment far more than anything else.  I can write it before I say it.  Whatever “it” is.  Even my own rauma story came out on paper before it ever came off my lips.

What creative experience gets your blood pumping, your energy blazing, your vision of the world more acute and finite?  What creative experience makes your heart sing?  Maybe it is an actual creative art: writing, painting, photography, film, dance, theatre.  Maybe it is just something that brings you fully alive: swimiing, surfing, motorcycle riding, fishing, parenting.

What makes your heart sing?  What do you wish you had in your life to make it more vibrant and alive?   What do you have in your life that brings you that joy and energy for living that you are grateful for?

I thank writing for many things.  I thank my mother for teaching me the love of words.  Words have been my lifeboat.  What is your lifeboat?

“I discovered that for many of us, the developmental tasks of the second half of life are primarily spiritual.”

Stephen Cope

 

According to author, yogi, and psychotherapist Stephen Cope midlife is a time to find our truer selves, the ones we are shrouding with perceived rich lives that when rattled, crack and required a rebuilding on a more solid internal foundation. 

 

According to Carl Jung (whom I have quoted before and Cope references in his book Yoga and The Quest for the True Self) I am now, as I have officially headed into my 30′s, considered to be in midlife.  Now some of that ideaology of midlife can be attributed to the era of Jung and less lengthy lives, but in point of fact I think it rings pretty true–at least relative to myself.

 

I have discussed on this blog some of the moves of my life–uprooting for the wrong and then the right reasons.  I have talked about my history of trauma, told my own story, and talked about the painful journey to get past that and start a life that was whole and real for myself.  I have talked some about the journey that brought me to a trauma therapist from the plight as a survivor and about how I feel professionally and personally imbued with a passion for trauma healing and the avenues of complementary therapies.  I have talked about what got me here, but where is here?

 

It seems to me that Jung and Cope have it right. 

 

I feel like my current path is a very deep and winding ravine.  One that I could not have traversed had I not gone through and overcome many of the obstacles that got me to this point.  I feel at a place professionally where I am established enough to vocalize myself with a dollop passion matched with a dab of authority on what I speak.  I feel like the storms of my life have quieted enough to allow me to take a deeper journey inward and find a depth of self and of life that I did not have the luxury to do before. 

 

I think wherever people are or whatever their life circumstances, the reason Cope and Jung talk about the 30s and 40s as that place of searching for a new meaning is due to those quelled oceans and those calming of life circumstances–perhaps as a result of facing the very worst demons in our lives or in our minds that we could imagine to get to a place where something deeper and more internal has some value. 

 

Lately I find myself pondering more than ever the inner workings of myself.  I said to my husband the other day (on his visit this past weekend for my birthday) how something feels like it aligned for me in this move.  It was not intentional and it did not result from trying to flee something, but it happened spontaneously and with unexpected mysteriousness. 

 

I felt freed from something invisible that I had not known was constraining me–whether it was just the simple stagnation that comes with familiarity of place, state, and life or it was something  bigger than that I cannot be sure. 

 

All I know is that something shifted in my move and for the better. 

 

And maybe it was also a confluence of circumstances leaving me with an abnormal amount of free time to ponder–with only the clicking of doggie toe nails on wood floors to distract me from my thoughts as I sit day after day in a new house, new town, and new life in a solitary kind of routine. 

 

I feel exploratory of my inner self in a playful and simultaneously intense way that leads me to want to explore further. 

 

All of this also leads excellently into beginning a yoga teacher training program.  Initially, I was pretty melancholy over the idea of having to wait two months to really get into the meat of this meatless excursion into self but as I have had time to digest (am I hungry?) the idea I realize that, that too has been a sort of blessing in disguise. 

 

 

 

I am a person with a huge inability to enjoy delayed gratification or wait for anything–I am a “Do it now!” kind of personality, for better or worse.  But in this forced state of expectation I have been able to pause, breathe, and even prepare for this next huge step of full immersion into a monastic training of ancient proportions. 

 

And in truth I think it is an undertaking that deserves this certain pause for a bit of reverence and a lot more preparation than I have been able to give it so far.  Not to mention a lot more required reading that I have been able to muster up to completing thus far.

 

I am doing fairly well on my plan to remove television or distraction (visual or auditory) from my sleep regimen, as well as being able to ease out of meaty delights (really I use meat, mostly, as a mandatory additive to a sandwich, more perfunctory than satiating so I hope this will go smoothly).  But fish and eggs might be harder as I am going to have to learn to live without so many of the staple additives to a meal that just come easily. 

 

The  next is overall distraction and noise.  I need to get out of the habit, that so many of us have, of coming home and switching on the television and just plopping.  I am, as my husband says (usually in reference to mail and clothes) “a plopper”.   I just come home and plop things, including my own body, down wherever they fall and then find it hard to recoup and reorganize, let alone motivate, once I have gone into full plop mode. 

 

I need to work on more intentional living as that seems a core root of a more spiritual and deeper existence.  Putting on a television is usually just a way to distract ourselves from inner self and thoughts and it is an easy solution to a few hours after work and before bed–but essentially unfulfilling.  So I am going to try to, gulp, spend less time plopping and more time focusing on something, anything.  Reading more and playing with my puppies and writing, writing, writing. 

 

I know we all do this.  We live easily more than we do intentionally.  We perceive ourselves superficially rather than below a surface level.  And often it takes a catalyst of some kind to shake us out of our daze and into something much more profound.  A move down some 1200 miles and a home echoing with silence (or NCIS–I know bad habits with the TV!) for me was a great catalyst to an internal state of wonder and self exploration that led to, among so many other adventures of self, writing this blog. 

 

I am excited to see what the next few months will bring and honored to be able to share that journey as it unfolds with whoever ever is willing to log on, click in, and listen. 

 

And, by the way, I find it to be no small coincidence that the man who wrote the quote below was also the same man who explored yoga and psychology and the potential healing effects of this particular moving art. 

 

“Among my patients in the second half of life–that is to say, over thirty-five–there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a spiritual outlook on life…and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his spiritual outlook.”

Carl Jung in Stephen Cope’s Yoga and the Quest for the True Self