Gratitude Poem #4

 

 Good Morning,

Divine Being.

Let's wrap each other

in sun warm arms

and weep for the 

magic of love.

Self Care

Yesterday I had a panic attack. It lasted about 9 hours, off and on. That's a pretty significant stretch for me. My longest last about a day and half. At the short end, it's usually under an hour. 

I don't feel super comfortable talking about this, but I know I'm not alone in the experience. As Ram Dass said, "We're all just walking each other home", so maybe by sharing I can help others feel comfortable opening up. This profoundly healing work is best done within a safe, loving, and compassionate community. 

 

 

That said, I don't typically reach out for support during the actual experience. It's difficult to verbally communicate through the crying and unclear thinking. Instead, I tend to reach out anonymously toward my favorite teachers (online and print) and into my own heart. Afterward, I can process it with real people if I need to.

 

My experience always starts with a trigger. This trigger could simply be my mind ruminating on the past, something someone said/did, or surprising noises/movements. I don't typically know I'm panicking at first, then before long I'm uncontrollably crying with a deep sense of emotional pain. Physically, my heart rate increases, temperature rises and I feel tightness in my stomach, heart and throat. 

This has been happening since I was a child, but has been most impactful when triggered at work. Suddenly I'm crying and cannot stop. I go into the bathroom to wait it out, but the harder I try to stop it, the more power the pain seems to have. It's embarrassing and has made me feel like such a weirdo, and not in the cool way!

Yesterday it started in the morning. I won't go into the triggers, but know I was alone and safe in my apartment. The feeling at first is that normal thinking starts to spiral in. Tighter and more rapid thoughts fill my awareness and I start to feel out of control. As perceived self-control leaves, panic steps in (the heart racing and all that) and I always start crying. Within seconds my face is hot and red, tears are blurring my vision and sinuses are full. 

By now I have some coping skills. I no longer try to stop it. As I said, that tends to make it worse and it never works anyway. Instead, I acknowledge that I'm having a breakdown. I take the day off and allow my body to move through it as I gently guide my mind and spirit toward healing activities. This time I listened to a talk on healing trauma, watched some videos on gratitude, attended an online meditation group, read some relevant articles and spent a lot of time meditating on my specific circumstance. By about 6 pm I felt better, kind of numb and exhausted, but calm and peaceful. 

I've been working to heal my mental health issues for a long time and am starting to see it all from a wider vantage point. It's like a treasure map, worn and illegible in places, but filled with delightful possibilities of unknown treasures to be found.

Thank you for walking me home.

Mountain Love

 I am the mountain

dressed in fir.

Glittering streams bejewel

my sides

as I sit 

solid and yours

beneath the sun.

Values

I'm listening to The Upside of Stress on Audible.

I could write a whole entry on the pros/cons of audio books, but I came here to talk about values, folks, and that's what I'm gonna do. 

First, a little back story. As part of the 8 week MBSR (mindfulness based stress reduction) course I am taking (offered for free here https://palousemindfulness.com) I watched a Ted Talk by Dr. McGonigal in which she discussed how it is not the type or amount of stress in one's life that is a predictor for health struggles, but more the attitude toward that stress that makes the difference. I read this in passing awhile back but hadn't looked into it. This is a topic of interest to me, so this time I'm taking a dive. 

McGonigal talks about how, for the 10 years prior she has been teaching her students about the high risks of stress to physical and mental health. Then she started reading studies on how attitude and mindset can vastly improve a person's ability to cope with stress, even for people living in chronic high-stress situations. This completely changed her approach to teaching, reframing the curriculum to be about feeling empowered rather than oppressed when dealing with challenges. The book covers many studies, interventions, and examples of how anyone can adjust their mindset to handle stress in a healthier way. I won't elaborate too much here, but I highly recommend it.

So, one intervention is to interject our strongest value(s) into our stress responses as they occur. The findings show that when people pair their feelings of stress with the values that put them in the situation in the first place, it helps to morph the more toxic "fight or flight" type of stress response into something more like a "tend and befriend" response. For example, maybe a person is supporting a loved one through a chronic health issue, feeling the overwhelm emotionally, physically, financially, etc. If they are able to remember why they are in the situation, because they love this person and want to help them heal, the stress response becomes more meaningful. It turns out, when we remember stress is actually a useful physiological response, helping our bodies prepare for difficult situations, the response itself is modified to be healthy rather than destructive. Crazy, huh? I'm way into it.

I want to try it, so I started with this prompt:

Identify 3 personal values most important and meaningful to you right now. Pick one and write about it for 10 minutes. Describe how it affects daily life, why it is important, how it comes into play during major stress, etc.

3 personal values that are meaningful right now: 

• kindness
• honesty
• humor

In trying times, humor is one of my faves so here we go...

That's funny, I'm trying to write about humor while thinking so seriously about brain schtuff. I love humor. Of course, I don't want it to hurt anybody, but as long as it's well-meaning I think humor makes most parts of life better.  

I just read somewhere that a woman, knowing she was in her final days, hired a flash mob to crash her funeral and turn it into a party. I fucking love this. It was on fb, so I didn't click the link (so many of them are not what they claim) but now I wish I had. How did it go? Did people mostly enjoy it or was it hard to handle? 

This past weekend, Erik and I went to help his brother's family with a house they're building. He and his wife have been working non-stop for over 2 years building this place, mostly by themselves on a limited budget, but they're almost done, yay! 

The work went easily, and we got a good amount done. But it was also challenging. Erik's brother is very ill. They have been going through so much with this; multiple medications, treatments, doctor visits requiring travel; he is in a lot of pain, she is working full-time. All this while raising two kids and building a house. The vibe this weekend could have been heavy, but it wasn't. They both have great senses of humor as do we, so all in all it was surprisingly energizing.

One minute to go... humor is important to me because I tend to be too serious minded, self-sabotaging myself a mountain out of molehill more times than I can count. It's amazing how a shift of mindset can turn a challenge into no biggie in the blink of an eye.

There! 10 minutes. 

I love you all and thank you for reading!