The magnolia is in bloom...

The sun is shining so brightly that even I can’t help but feel uplifted. The daffodils are out, the blossom is extravagant on the trees and our magnolia is flowering. I think I may have weathered another winter.

I am feeling a bit brighter and certainly have a little less pain. It is remarkable how quickly I see my body and soul bouncing back from the edge of the abyss. Two weeks ago I was terrified of what would come next. I felt helpless and hopeless. Today there was a little bit of a spring in my step. There must have been a noticeable change in my demeanor as well since both the manager at our local Starbucks and our greengrocer commented on how much better I was looking. This was something of a surprise since I thought I looked a tad rough today. All I can imagine is that I looked really dreadful for the past weeks and in comparison today I’m looking good. There is still some way to go.

I still feel very guilty that the changes I am experiencing are more likely to do with medication that enlightenment. I have such a strong voice screaming in my head, saying ‘failure, failure, failure’ and this is so very difficult to get past. By taking anti-depressants medication I am admitting to an inability to do it alone. I need help and not help to resolve this through talking therapy or learning from my own insights, but help from chemicals that change the way my brain works. This is a bit scary for me since it also means that my brain chemistry needed changing. I guess I finally have to accept that this is a state that I have been in before and may well be in again. It is not the first time this has happened. Not even the second or third!

What is helping me is recognising that the most positive thing I have done to change the depression I was experiencing was to go to my doctor and ask for help. I try to convince myself that there is no difference between taking medication for depression than taking medication for diabetes  - if it helps and it exists, then fine.  And yet, I am horribly defensive about this and a bit ashamed to have been unable to pull myself up alone. I see that as I begin to feel a bit brighter I am already thinking about how long I will need to rely on drugs to help. For the moment this is where I am and accepting that without self-blame needs to happen.

I am so afraid of the judgements of others. I am 62 years old, have had a successful career, raised two spectacular kids, have a wonderful relationship with a man I love and I inside still feel about 10 years old and insecure. I still have so many fears and so much doubt. I still expect to get rejected by those I love. I still don’t believe how much I am loved. Maybe I still need to keep taking the tablets.

See, I knew this whole week was about trust – and there it is again.

It begins and ends with trust today...

‘You can’t stop the waves, but you can learn to surf’. 

Jon Kabat-Zinn

The question that immediately came to mind was ‘what if you’re afraid of the water?’

I am a very poor swimmer. I believe I could swim a length of a small swimming pool (very small) though I have not been called on to test this out in many years. No one ever taught me to swim. As a matter of fact the only thing I remember being taught is that water, especially the ocean, is a force to be wary of, a force to be frightened of and treated with the utmost respect, that is, something to stay away from. Where did I learn this? I guess it was from my mother.

For the first years of my life my mum, dad, brother, aunt, uncle, cousins and I went to Far Rockaway for the summer.  Rockaway Peninsula is the only real oceanfront beach in New York. Each summer the women and children left the city to go to the beach and for the whole summer season we lived in these wooden shack-like bungalows. Everything was very basic. The women of the family spent lots of time cooking, gossiping and often letting us kids run riot. We were very close to the ocean.  I don’t once remember going swimming or seeing anyone else from my family swimming. The ocean seemed to be there as a source of cheap air conditioning.  A way of cooling down on a hot day was to sit near the water’s edge, staying far from the waves so as not to get wet. I have a vague memory of walking towards the ocean while holding my mother’s hand and her telling me stories about how people drown in the ocean!

So, in my house, it wasn’t a case of stopping the waves or learning to surf, it was more a case of when the waves come, run. No wonder I’m afraid of the water.

When I do venture into the water my swimming technique has parallels to the way I live my life. I make lots of movements, flap around, expend lots of energy and hardly move forward at all. Is this the way I go through my days, flapping, squawking, exhausting myself and hardly moving? Sad if it is, but I do see that I can do less and achieve more.  I exhaust myself in so many ways, I use up the energy that could be supporting me. I never just float.

Think about floating on your back in the water. What does it depend on? It doesn’t depend on how thin you are, how tall or short, how skilful you are – no. Floating, the ability to let go, relax and let the water carry you is entirely dependant on trust. There’s that word again. Trust. Knowing that the water will support you, carry you along while you can enjoy the peace and quiet of the sky above. I find this so difficult. I will allow myself to float for a few moments and then I inevitably stop the process and begin to sink. I would hate to think this is the story of my life.

For me where it begins is this:

“We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us something is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit.”

― E.E. Cummings

I guess I may have to learn to surf after all.

Learning to distinguish...

This morning I went to my acupuncturist for my weekly session. As I was lying on the table I realised I had no idea what the acupuncturist was actually doing. I just get up on to the table, lie down and close my eyes. Then, because this is Japanese acupuncture and the needles are tiny, I don't feel much of what she is doing. She begins to take pulses and do a route around my body, pricking and prodding as she goes. Sometimes she asks me to turn my head to one side or the other to see if the pain in my neck is easier and sometimes she just moves around me in silence while carrying on with tiny inexplicable actions.  I have never once opened my eyes to see what she is doing. Occasionally I smell the familiar smell of burning as she warms the needles, but usually I just space out and go somewhere else.

This is most unusual for me. I am someone who researches everything about any medical practitioner who recommends a treatment for me. I don’t trust doctors at all and watch their behaviour with hawk-like attention. Why have I chosen to trust this woman, especially when I am so sceptical of so much alternative medicine? It is not as if I am seeing miracle results. It isn’t even as if I know the system of acupuncture that she is using. There are far fewer practitioners of Japanese acupuncture than those following the Chinese system. The only thing I am sure of is that the sessions feel increasingly soothing and right now this is what I need.

Lying down on the treatment table today I allowed myself to really relax and travelled to another, quieter realm. I came back from there realising that I need to be clearer about distinguishing my feelings, i.e. my emotions, from my feelings, i.e. painful or pleasurable bodily sensations. If I can once again learn to make those distinctions I am sure that I will be less disturbed and shaken off centre. I know on some level that I am too identified with my body, but hell, it’s my body, what am I supposed to do with it when it hurts, when I can’t walk for pain or when it let’s me down. I have spent so long dis-identifying my self from my physical body it was always one of the reasons I was neglectful of my health. I now see that there is a difference, a very clear difference, between disowning my body and owning my physical body but not getting caught up in identifying my psyche with pain. This also means that the nature of pleasure is also a feeling that I can allow to flow over me. No feeling needs to be so important. They are just feelings, regardless of whether I label them as positive or negative, or in terms that make more sense to me, sensations. The sensations I experience need not rock who I am or how I feel in myself. Learning to witness all these fleeting things is a life lesson. I saw today how much I still have to learn.

I also spent some time today NOT beating myself up for forgetting what I already knew, but congratulating myself for remembering what I have learned and remembering to remember it! It comes back to what I started this week writing about - trust. Tough lessons this week, but really worthwhile, I think.

To sleep, perchance to dream...

Warning: This blog entry contains nothing whatsoever about wisdom, meditation or spring coming and the grass growing by itself. It is entirely and unapologetically self-indulgent today.

Lately I have had some really vivid dreams. It could be that my imagination is running riot at night and sending me into situations that my unconscious mind knows I am not strong enough to resolve during my waking hours or, more likely, it is an early side effect of medication. Whatever is causing my night time manoeuvres doesn’t really matter because they are certainly entertaining. In fact my sleeping life is currently far more exciting than my waking one.

At the outset, let me lay my cards on the table, be perfectly open and frank and waylay any smartass commentary. I am aware that ALL dreams are sexual in nature. They are all open to Freudian interpretation and all boil down to repressed sexuality. OK, that’s out of the way so now I can begin.

Let me set the scene first. Two days ago we became aware of an unpleasant smell in the downstairs of my house, a very unpleasant smell. All of us looked suspiciously at each other, but no, it wasn’t of human origin and after checking various drains and overflow pipes it seems as if we have a rotting animal corpse somewhere under our house. Short of digging up the entire floor there is no real answer except to wait and hope the smell dissipates. To say that I am disturbed by this is an under-exaggeration. I am horrified.  As I fell asleep that night I could just get whiffs of the horrid odour and it was my last conscious thought before falling into a deep sleep. 

Dreaming – the smell was strong and very noxious. I started to explore where the smell could have been coming from and made a mysterious discovery. There were workmen dismantling the house next door and in doing so were relocating all the sewage pipes to flow over my back kitchen door. No one had asked us for permission to do this. In reality I don’t have a back kitchen door, but in my dream my house had a different configuration. Not only were the plumbing pipes being moved on to my property, but they were being installed wrongly. I knew exactly where they should go (?).  Suddenly the workmen started knocking down the back wall of my house. It was a total mess and things started falling apart. I remember screaming and being very, very angry. ’How dare they!” It was at that point in my dream I grabbed a huge machete or axe and ran towards the people destroying my house. I knew that I was quite prepared to kill the destroyers. I felt wild with anger.

And then I woke up! What the hell could that mean? I know that I am hung up on issues of security and safety and I also know that I am frightened of seeing my own defences crumble around me, but I awoke quite startled at the level of my rage and my absolute conviction that I would have killed someone, at least in my sleep state.

Last night I dreamt a completely different scene. I was on my way to the seaside and was being accompanied by two people. The first was a child of about 6 years old, the son of a very good friend of mine and the second was David Cameron, the Prime Minister. So far, so bizarre. David Cameron was flirtatious and a bit inappropriate with me, but I wasn’t particularly interested. I was laughing and fairly carefree. I was more involved in buying sweets for the little boy at a huge candy stall in a local market. The seaside location was somewhere I have visited in my dreams many times before. I realised, even as I was dreaming that this place was familiar from earlier dreams, so familiar I could begin to map it when awake.

The next thing I knew all three of us were walking up an outside staircase to a room or apartment. Cameron went away into the bedroom, the boy disappeared and suddenly there was Cameron wearing women’s clothes, my clothes I think, even though I was still fully dressed. Cameron beckoned to me to come into bed. He looked most strange. Here was the British Prime Minister wearing a silver sequinned top and satin leggings inviting me to bed. I was both amused and distressed. Had he misread my lack of interest as something else? I started shouting at him ‘Stop being so stupid’ and the more I shouted, the happier he became. It dawned on me that Cameron was a masochist and that my shouting at him was making him very excited. He invited me to hit him with a hairbrush! I was horrified. This was a no win situation because the more forcefully angry I became, the more stimulated it made him. I walked away to think about what I could do. I also remember making some comment about this behaviour being very wrong with a child present.

As I walked away I remembered I had my camera and re-entered the bedroom and began taking photos of David Cameron dressed in women’s clothes. He had by now donned a very fetching pale pink feather boa and was begging me to hit him as I repeatedly snapped photos. I escaped from the room and knew that the camera contained the evidence that could damage the Prime Minister’s reputation forever. By simply giving the photos to the newspapers I could single-handedly bring down the government. But wait, not only could I do that, but I could SELL the photos to the papers thus making me rich at the same time.

This became the real dilemma of the dream. Do I give the evidence to the newspapers and rid the country of an unfair, undemocratic government or do I sell them to the gutter press for exorbitant sums of money? Selling the photos would mean that I would no longer have any money worries, but would place me in a morally compromised position. Donating them would accomplish what I wanted but surely no one would blame me from profiting from my situation. Should I or shouldn’t I?  What should I do? This was when I woke up.

This is a summary of the past two nights. I awake tired. I think all the running about in my night travels exhausts me. So much processing. I hope you can see how my unconscious dream state is puzzling to me. Aside from the reality which is that I hate our present UK government and there is an unholy smell in my house, I have no real idea as to the meaning of these vivid dreams.

Any ideas?

Turn off the GPS

Friend 1: Are you visiting us tomorrow? Do you need directions?

My son

Friend 2: I’m all set. I have the address, a GPS, and a GPS override.

Friend 1: What’s a GPS override?

Friend 2: My wife.

Holding back from being an over-bearing Jewish mother is a trial. My natural instinct is to jump into the lives of my children and offer advice, answers and information. This might be acceptable if it was welcome, but often it is not. I begin to see that one of the main reasons the interference is unwelcome is just exactly that, it is interference that appears to be a lack of trust. If I trusted my children more, I would stand back, watch and wait to be asked. I would be able to allow more and if I really were to open my eyes I would see that most, if not all the time, my adult children cope just fine without my advice.

Trust is an issue for me. I am not good at just allowing anyone to act and waiting for an outcome. I always seem to think I have a better way or I pre-empt others’ finding their own way. I am like a living GPS system, constantly issuing information. Turn right here, turn left there, carry on for another mile … a living GPS with a New York accent and a Jewish mother tone in her voice. Anyone’s nightmare scenario!

I lie awake at night and invent problems for which I then have to find solutions. This is not just a waste of my energy and time, it is also a source of anxiety. I read and chant (sometimes) all these positive affirmations but when it comes to trusting that my spouse, my children, my bank, my doctor, my plumber, my dentist, my car mechanic or myself know what they are doing and I can sit back and relax – almost impossible.

This truly must be the definition of ‘driving yourself crazy’. Seeing this, admitting this, is the first step and  the next step is how to stop. Last week I was given advice (unasked for may I add) that I might begin by not starting sentences with ‘You should’. This would certainly help. I am filled with shoulds. I hear my mother reeling off her lists of shoulds all the time. I remember as a child hearing that I should do better, I should be thinner, I should be more feminine (this said after I refused to wear frilly lace blouses that were in style then), I should clean my room, I should do more. I remember feeling like screaming at my mum, actually I remember screaming at her very often, ‘leave me alone’. Sadly this has become a default mantra of mine whenever I feel stressed. A real Catch-22 this one, leave me alone, but come and take care of me.

I digress. I was looking at how much I over-mother my children. My children are not even slightly children anymore. They are old enough to have their own lives. They are financially independent and for the most part, they make pretty good choices. I know that as a parent I have helped equip them with life skills that empower them to make their own decisions. So why do I still have this need to interfere. It is rarely needed and if it is needed, I am invited to give advice or add an opinion. Maybe I am just afraid that if I don’t insinuate myself into their lives they will leave me out, though in reality this is highly unlikely.

So it’s time to re-programme this GPS – change the tone, alter the accent and maybe encourage patience. Usually if I wait long enough everyone finds their own way and it’s always the best way for them. If I can re-programme well enough I might even be able to completely relax and enjoy the journey trusting that we will all reach the destinations we choose.

Baby steps ...

Warning: This blog entry may be boring and repetitious, but I need to write today so bear with me.

I was never quite sure why I stopped writing. I thought it was because I had run out of things to say and yet I never stopped talking to whoever was around to hear. I imagined that as my life was reasonably even for a bit I didn’t need to use this forum as a way of clarifying my thoughts.  I stopped using my writing as therapy and felt that the course of sessions had run their time and it was now time to listen and not write. All of these are valid. They were all true to a greater of lesser extent, but in talking to a very old, good friend a few nights ago I re-inspired myself. I got excited once again about writing, not as therapy, as creativity.

Let’s cut to the chase here – go straight to the core of all of it. I am often not okay. I have long periods of time when I sink into places of such darkness that I cannot begin to see any glimmers of light. This past six months has been one long bad dream. Even before the death of my father I was in pain with my back and neck. This pain has carried on, worsened and ground me down until it was almost all I could think about. Sleepless nights, limited walking, pain, pain and more pain led to months of drugs, x-rays, doctor referrals, fighting with the National Health Service for adequate diagnosis and tests and finally, not a great diagnosis – nothing too serious, but not easy either. My father’s death sent me into a downward spiral of sadness and long periods of time when I didn’t work. When I finally returned to work it was the middle of winter and the dark days sent me further into my old friend, depression. A brief respite of a delightful few weeks in California with my children was a welcome change, but only solidified my despair at having limited mobility and pain. Returning to London I was sad, dispirited and anxious as hell. Work was adequate at best. I’m sure others didn’t really notice my lapses, my lack of passion and my partial commitment, but I did. I was distraught. It’s hard to do less than your best when you know what you are capable of achieving.

Two weeks ago I finally made the decision to give up work for an extended period of time. I also finally realised that I couldn’t weather this particular spell on my own and needed the help of medication. This was and still is, a hard thing for me to admit. I have spent many years in an environment where the route through depression was always expression, catharsis and therapy. To take medication feels like failing. It feels like I am saying I can’t do it anymore and that admission is a weakness. I am working with trying to drop that belief because I also know that that is a belief that works against me. It is an old message that probably has its roots in fear that if I show weakness, if I admit that I need help, I will be vulnerable and that’s dangerous. I wonder where I’ve heard that before!

I am not familiar to myself at the moment. I am not capable and in control. This means I am adjusting to a different me right now. A part of me that needs very careful nurturing is more present than the independent adult self I present to the world. I am a bit more reclusive and a lot more fragile. I do feel like I am suffering from some sort of post-traumatic shock, though I am not quite sure what the shock is/was. I don’t know yet if the anti-depressant meds will help, but hell, it’s worth a shot. What helped immediately was just letting me hear myself say, I need help. I can’t do this alone.

Baby steps… a day at a time.