Battling through
(Not my arm)
Hi First name / friend!
“When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive - to breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love.”
This beautiful quote from Marcus Aurelius has been my phone background for several weeks now and it is still working for me.
When you're feeling down, people remind you of all the things you've got to be grateful for. Gratitude practices definitely help, but it's the way we do it that is most impactful.
If we beat ourselves up with gratitude (e.g. “look how much you've got to be grateful for and you're still feeling bad? Shame on you!”) we become even smaller. We consider ourselves then to be ungrateful, further doubling down on feelings of low self-worth and fuelling that voice inside our heads that is primed to look for anything negative.
If we allow ourselves to feel what we feel and, alongside this, seek out moments for which we are grateful from our day, it can feel like gently taking the lid off something that's been furiously bubbling away. This looks more like “okay, I'm feeling bad, but was there something from my day I can choose to notice and be grateful for?”
This week in a yoga class I was attending, the teacher (the inimitable @calliyoga) said “do not go to war with you body”.
Patients who come to see me are often at war with themselves; we often all are at some point in the day! We feel beleaguered by aches and pains, frustrated at fatigue or inconvenienced by our irritable bowel symptoms.
The body is just doing what it knows how to do. It's sending us messages in the only language it knows. When we berate it, we belittle our body's innate ability for healing and its wisdom in trying to show us things about our lifestyle that are or are not working.
Do not go to war with yourself. How interesting, then, the language of “battling” cancer. That's a complicated one, I guarantee, and I don't feel qualified to really comment, but consider the language. Is it helpful? Perhaps it is.
Perhaps again, as with our practice of gratitude, it all comes down to the way we frame it. Are we fighting for something, or against something? If we fight for ourselves, we are honouring our self-worth. But perhaps fighting, or battling against, is an energy-consuming process much like anger.
I'm currently in a bit of a fighting spirit. I am not going to war against my mental health, but rather considering that depression and anxiety might be symptoms, not end-point diagnoses. I have felt an itching to run more over the past few months, but life and timing invariably got in the way. Then I asked myself, would I still struggle with depression and anxiety if I ran every day? So, 36 days before Christmas, I decided to run every day until Christmas day, a challenge I have coined the #ChristmasRUNdown. (If you're wondering, it's now 33 days til Christmas.)
Be very sure, I am not running away from depression or anxiety. Nor am I going to war against it. I am considering them, instead, as symptoms of inactivity and restlessness. I am considering days of low mood or anxiousness to be questions, and exercise to be the answer.
Mindful moment: Can you reframe something you're going through in a way that is more gentle? Can you lean in to difficult feelings and still consider effective action to overcome them? Perhaps you find it helpful to consider something you're experiencing as question? For example, if this pain is asking me a question, what might the answer be? What question is your low energy asking of you? We may then be able to frame our answers as effective action, without going to war with ourselves.
Love, Laura
Quote for the weekend…
“Come here, then.
Every ditch has been exalted.
We are covered with stars.
Feel how light they are, our lives.”
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Welcome to the Community.
I'm Laura, a yoga teacher and NHS doctor. With this weekly newsletter I aim to help you incorporate mindful moments into your week. I want you to feel inspired, empowered and creative. I promise to always be authentic; to only include content that speaks to me and which, therefore, I hope will do the same for you.
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