LostInTheWoods: Healing

[LostInTheWoods]

Slightly more energetic today than previous days. Had an anxiety peak at noon that went away in a hour or two. I abstained from feeding it thoughts, and it worked.

 

The university friends' meeting got cancelled. Too bad, I was hoping to push myself to sociability these Saturday. Gotta see who if there's someone available to meet.

 

Last Tuesday I went to the gym again to give some good (read: hard) time to the chest and shoulders and finished by 19:00 h. Success: didn't got affected and I got to remember what it is to have muscles. Per recomendation of the Upward Spiral book, I'm conciously trying to keep a straight posture while standing, and walking; used to believe it was a one way street (being hunched due to being depressed-should work the mood in order to lift the column) but apparently even the basis for yoga is that the mind does react to what it tells the body to do. Feels weird, yet it's worth trying.

 

On the LitW's culture section, this time it's turn for the Mushishi series. Being a japanese animated show, technically it's anime but to say it is anime is akin to saying that the whale shark is a shark. Just as you won't find pointy teeth, savage predation and the need to watch from a cage regarding the whale shark, in Mushishi you aren't going to find samurai clashing swords with each other, freebee eyed school girls or hyper powered martial arts. It is actually a very mystical or spiritual with a slow pace which develops in antique, agricultural and natural landscapes full of the green of trees, bushes, grasses and vegetables, the blue of skies, lagoons and seas and the sounds of crickets and other insects. Anyone who can reach this series out (I think the 2nd season is available on Netflix), it is highly recommended, gives a soothing feeling and peace very appropiate for the hard WD days.

 

 

Central to the series are the mushi, ethereal and abstract beings permeating the environment and interacting with living beings in intrincate ways, sometimes beneficial, other times tragic. One great aspect is how the mushishi, the people who are able to see them and study them, do not condemn either the mushi themselves or the interactions that they bring, saying calmly that related trouble isn't either the humans or mushis' fault, only infortunate encounters, and move on.

 

(one chapter spoilers)

In one of the chapters, we are watching a kid who just lust his remaining parent in a mudslide, learning from an old hermit woman to understand the mushi, as much as they can be understood, and accept them for what they are. At one point, both are devoured by a dark one: the teacher, having lived long enough, chooses to pass on, but advises the kid on how to survive: choose a name and remember it well, lest you lose yourself entirely to the darkness, offer one eye and close the other and keep looking for the exit as a new dawn is bound to appear to you. The kid walks and walks through the darkness, memories coming to him at random. Sometimes he sees the moon setting on the horizon... only for it to come out again and restart the night over and over. Finally, as he leaves the mountains, morning comes at last: he's changed, his hair is no longer black but a clean white and his remaining eye has become emerald green. Despite the losses, he has a bright future ahead and becomes the serie's Mushishi, a calm man of serene temperament who travels the world, offering his knowledge while getting to enjoy both the big and small things he encounters along the way.

 

Fitting story, many other great there.

[LostInTheWoods]

Today I was on a trip and visited the Death Museum, one dedicated at showing how death has been portrayed in mexican culture since before the Conquest to modernity.

 

Most of it is usual in the sense of funeral burials among some artifacts and ornaments and beliefs of several types of underworlds where souls went once life was over. Of course, there's the human sacrifice rituals whose grittiness tend to cause shock to foreigners and then the mixture of precolombine local customs and catholic ones brought by the spaniards.

 

Ironically, it is one of the newest customs the one who I would consider one of the most peculiar: the constant depictions of people from highest class governors to regular townspeople as skeletons (calacas or calaveras) doing daily activities like working or partying. Started by litographer José Guadalupe Posada but perpetuated directly in the form of the Catrina and indirectly, in the cult of the Holy Death, it be interpreted on a positive or negative light. the positive one could be showing the finitude of life and the fact that you may be bound to die as shown by the skeleton but live your life anyway, without making too much of a fuzz about it (as heard somewhere "we have been dying since the moment we're born"); on the negative side, could be about life being futile and empty, everyone looking the same under the hood of skin and flesh, smiles forced by the exposed denture and a stare empty and bottomless due to the lone eye sockets. A biographer described Álvaro Obregon, a general turned president, as a man whose eloquence and readiness for humor and jokes hid a disdain for life as nothing but a farce to act out until death lowered the curtain.

 

Some symptoms like the eye twicth remain, but big ones are the anxiety and depression. Last one is the one that unsettles me the most since looks like one of a "higher order" origin, that I must solve by thinking hard about my goals and positions about life and find something worth enough to believe and to live and die for. For once, I'm looking into some books about prayer like Sadhana from Anthony de Mello: I'm having a longer trip next weekend in which I want to visit both temples and natural landscapes in a quest for answers. 

[LostInTheWoods]

I walked ten thousand miles,

ten thousand miles to see you

and every gasp of breath

I grabbed just to find you.

 

I climbed up every hill to get, to you

I wondered ancients lands to hold, just you.

 

And every single step of the way, of pain.

Every single night and day I searched for you.

Through sandstorms and hazy dawns I reached for you.

 

I'm tired and I'm weak, but I'm strong, for you.

I wanna go home but my love, gets me through.

 

- The Sore Feet Song. Ally Kerr.

 

Sorry guys. Was feeling melancholic today and wanted to evoke some feelings of hope. Even brought me a tear as I was listening and singing along. Feel like a emotional lady, but at least better now.

 

The heat wave that had been hitting town hard has officially gave its place to some cloudy and slightly rainy days. My evening walk was frustrated today and for a moment puts me anxious, like a caged lion walking back and forth within the walls of my house. Watched some series on Netflix at least to ease the passing of time. I believe I'm slightly better than last two weeks but during the momentary anxiety and depression lapses it feels as if things had always been that way and would keep being that forever.

 

Nice to have rain back, though (the place I live has a semidesertic weather and hot sun over dry soil is usually the norm). The background sound of the rain droplets hitting windows, domes, tree, leaves and other surfaces, the humid atmosphere with its peculiar way to transmit sound, the shades of gray with diffused light instead of distinct sunrays and shadows... I don't mind to lose myself while observing and listening to it.

[JanCarol]

Hey Lost - you are so poetic and deep!

It is a pleasure to visit your thread an dive into new cultures (I love the Mushishi!) and music (Porcupine Tree!  I'm a Yes Fan, myself).

You have seen great improvement over time, and are finding ways to survive and manage without the drugs - vital to healing!

 

I think that many of us, myself included, will always need a certain vigilance to manage mood.  Yes, there is a certain wisdom (like the Emerald Eye Kid of Mushi tales) that we have "been through it and done it" but there is also a certain vulnerability - like a channel carved in our brains and beings that it is easy to fall back into.

 

I call it "default."  I "default" to depression, when presented with stress.  But if I pay attention (Attention!  Attention!  I love attention!), I can stop at the edge of the cliff, and clamber up one fingertip at a time, and prevent the fall into crisis where I have been before.  

 

I think that this is the process you are learning.  Thank you for sharing your journey with us, and your tools and your culture.

 

I hope you see the sun today!

[LostInTheWoods]

Thanks Jan Carol! Always good to see people satisfied with the posts.

 

Haven't updated in a while. Lots of things have happened: on a trip to Mexico city met many places, ate at lots of restaurants and went to watch some museums and other attractions. Not all time it was joy and happiness but even the days with slightly low mood were manageable and some other were full liveliness and excitement. Something big changed: my obsessive thinking about anxiety and sleep faded and were gone. Left me impacted for good.

 

I'm still dealing with minor depression and low energy days but overall feel better equipped to deal with them. Feels like having a slightly extended but ordinary bad day instead of that ominous state of SSRI driven impending doom of a month ago. Been pushing two different directions as of late: reading about Zen Buddhism for one. It has been quite hard or out of the box since the whole idea of "emptying oneself from thoughts" or abandoning oneself to the void is quite alien at first for someone as scientific and rational thought oriented as me. That said, there are some gems:

 

...If we try to build an absolutely exact thermostat, we mean, if we set the upper and lower temperatura limits too close to each other in order to keep the temperature at 20 °C, every system will fail. Because if the upper and lower limits coincide, so will the turning on and off signals of the heater. If 20 degrees is both the upper and lower lmit, the "run" signal will also be the stop one, 'yes' will imply 'no' and 'no' will imply 'yes'. The mechanism will then start to tremble, turning on and off continuously until it goes broke and stops working. The system is very sensitive and show symptoms eerily resembling those of human anxiety. Indeed, when a human being is so selfconcious, so self restrained it can 'abandon itself', it shivers and oscillates between opposites.

 

Quite eloquent paragraph. The suggestion seems to be to stop pushing yourself to a state of joy and relaxation since the idea already conveys fleeing from depression and anxiety and ends up being paradoxical. I'm not still feeling like doing since the idea of "not attempting to not be depressed" sounds too much like "despair", but that said, I probably need to delve deeper into it.

 

The other activity I have been doing is to pray. Old regular catholic prayer to the Virgin Mary, since the disappearance of the obsessive thoughts happened while visiting her temple. Can't say I'm an expert and full adept at itbut have found some meaning to it related to the Zen: the continuous repetition, which I always saw as something as meaningless as monotonous, is good at emptying the head of any other thoughts which sometimes have a hold of the brain, especially on someone as mentally overactive as myself. So as the prayer goes it feels as if the entire being slowly but steadily focus and gets completely oriented towards the simple yet interesting goal of becoming "one".

 

So far it's been helping and progress is being made even if slowly but somehow feels as having all the time in the world for it.

[miT]

On 18-7-2017 at 2:59 AM, LostInTheWoods said:

Quite eloquent paragraph. The suggestion seems to be to stop pushing yourself to a state of joy and relaxation since the idea already conveys fleeing from depression and anxiety and ends up being paradoxical. I'm not still feeling like doing since the idea of "not attempting to not be depressed" sounds too much like "despair", but that said, I probably need to delve deeper into it.

 

It's called surrender. Life will never come on your implied terms. So you either live it or you fight it. The funny thing is, when you stop fighting life, life often changes for the better. The enemy fades when you decide to bare its presence.

[LostInTheWoods]

 

Some time since last post. On the good side, I have managed to stay functional, going ahead and working; I could say it is a window in the sense the too familiar symptoms of abstract anxiety, twitches and overall bad feeling have been missing, and what remains are issues that I can attribute to mild depression.

 

This week was on the lower end due to my fault entirely: last weekend I was invited to a beer fest and, not having been to anyone before and although the event was great in terms of ambience, food and beer quality, I got ahead of myself and drank some beers with 8-10 % alcohol that one could have with typical light ones. It wasn’t disastrous as in losing consciousness, not remembering stuff the day after or even throwing up but here is where age shows up and maybe the fragility post WD: the hangover next day was painful and tedious and filled me with anxiety until the early evening and even after that, I’m sure it triggered a depressive lapse that sank me for most of last week. Only felt the mood lifting until yesterday and I’m still jumping to high from low and viceversa on a whim. Lesson learned, I’m back to a single drink or two when occasions arise.

 

I keep praying on some nights when I feel too mentally aroused to go to sleep and practice blanking the mind in the sense of the zen teachings. It actually feels soothing, as going underwater all of a sudden and let the sounds and other sensations fill the senses and abandoning oneself to it. It is easy to do it when walking through the colony’s streets full of trees, grass and other elements of nature, or next to the fountain near the parish church. Harder to do it on the usual environments such as work where sounds are repetitive and mechanical, coming from ugly or dull looking machines.

 

It is true indeed that a lot of anxiety and preemptive suffering comes from looking too much into the future and that such agony subsides when I start enjoying the present moment. Back in the day the notice of a work trip happening in the upcoming week could fill me with worry about how it could mean such a bigger load of work and how tired I would be after it, effectively becoming a burden way before it happened. I’m in the process of finding the right way to handle since it still feels like a contradiction to be able to plan about it without letting it make me worry about it. Maybe I’m getting careless, but some times I have been able to brush it off and keep focusing my mind on the present day.

 

Overall, I feel confident even in the lowly moments, identifying depression and anxious moments for what they are and seeing the temporality of them. Symptoms of withdrawal seem to be fading and at this point I have hopes on dealing with future issues without relying on drugs. It’s been tough, but a significant distance has been covered.

[LostInTheWoods]

Some more time has happened. Withdrawal like symptoms seem to be gone so far, so it could be what is left are the daily chores, the struggles of the ordinary man. I wish I could end this and say "and LitW lived happily ever after" but looks like there's a lot of pending issues to right. Hard to describe it, some stories come to mind about how this lifting of the fog is at the same time a relief and a realization that a lot of work needs to be done since things aren't going to make themselves right.

 

One of these stories is Augustus, from Herman Hesse's Strange News from Another Star collection of tales. In it, our eponymous character is born with a miracolous gift, wished by his mother and granted by a misterious old man: everyone loves him inconditionally, a priori, by default. To peoples' eyes he can do no wrong and therefore he never fell out of their favor but, at the same time, people never truly got into his. Is it really a gift? He can't possibly be scolded or disliked by his peers regardless of what he does, so he eventually despises everyone, takes advantage of business partners, prompt lovers, everyone he can until he can't take it anymore. He finally finds that old man who granted his mother's wish and asks him for a new one: to be him the one to able to love others. And as one spell befalls on him, another one vanishes. He can love now, but everyone he knew no longer has this bias towards him and quickly deny whatever they were handing to him and demand back what they gave in excess. Augustus now falls out of everybody's grace and becomes impoverished but, among what could easily be the ruins of his past opulence, he gets to admire people's efforts to keep living their lives and the peace with which they do so. So he got to llive the wreckage of his affected past but got the wisdom to overcome it.

 

There's also this other story where a certain people in a village have a curse which makes them live life fast and intensely. Like a fly or any other insect with a epheremal life, each day passes to them as the greatest spectacle ever, a one-shot miracle, intense and sublime. They look like in trance, distant and lost, and at the end of each day they figuratively grow old and die to be reborn and rejuvenate to live another life the following day. Finally, a method is found to lift off the curse and many return to the common life; others however, daunted by vastness of time before and after them, find themselves a way to recast their curse and live in their stupor again.

 

Or more easily, the kind of story of the recluse  set free after decades of imprisonment, now himself thrown in a environment that isn't his own anymore with the task of getting the most of the years to come with the little he could got of his previous ones.

 

This is the kind of feelings that fill me these days. On the one part, now I can fully comprehend the little I gave to my closed ones when being under the fog of ADs and their withdrawal and note some sort of surrender of their expectations towards me. I must go on and open to the world but the task feels huge, scary, intimidating. Not that I have decided to go back into ADs or find a surrogate but as Bane would say, finding relief through them looks "so easy... so simple". I'll keep climbing out of the hole and into the light, but sometimes if looks hard which is the next rock to grasp.

[Icip]

How are you doing @LostInTheWoods?