Belated blogiversary and self-expression

Tags

bare necessities, blogiversary, C’est la vie, Energy, Happy blog birthday, Love, mwah, self-expression

Strawberry tea in the teapot of love

First point of business for this post is to acknowledge that I managed to miss my third blogiversary date – 27^th May 2011. It zoomed right on by, as many things are doing at the moment (like writing more regular blog posts).

It’s because I’m busily living in a haze, trying to find my balance and I sure as heck don’t have all the answers yet. Of course, there’s also the excitement of having a brand new niece-ling join us in this world. There was much anticipation leading up to her arrival, and she’s been bewitching us with her cuteness and sweet-mannered charm ever since.

My general preoccupation is doing the bare minimum to get by. Going to work, teaching yoga, going to yoga, reading up on thyroid disorders, making sure I get enough of the right food, sleeping as much as I can, seeing doctors and specialists, seeing my acupuncturist and kinesiologist, getting blood tests and ultrasounds and generally just trying to make sure I’m functional.

I do all of this alone, with no one else to cook meals or run errands for me. It keeps me busy. I don’t always get it right, but I’m conscious of conserving/building my energy stores and keeping my stress levels as low as possible.

Most days of the week, it’s all I can do to get out of bed and not because of depression – every cell in my body is exhausted. It’s often mid-morning before I’m really awake and my system blinks into life.

This is partly why I haven’t been writing very much. My mood and energy levels are so up and down that when I do feel normal, it’s very pleasurable to do nothing much at all and just enjoy feeling somewhat stable.

Then there’s this: right now I get overwhelmed a lot. I regularly feel weak and sad. When I’m not those things, I’m doing what I can to be strong, optimistic, pragmatic, and believe that I can get through all of this. It’s hard not to feel like life really sucks sometimes when I’m facing off with yet another massive hurdle to jump.

Other times I feel blessed. I know in my heart that my path as a teacher is as someone who can share with others from first-hand experience. I know what the dark night of the soul is all about. I understand depression and grief and trauma, body and self-image issues, and I know the hard yards it takes to heal body and mind of dis-ease and imbalance.

Sometimes I go through all of the above in a single day. But then, mood swings are a common symptom of Hashimoto’s. C’est la vie, right?

I don’t want this blog to become the place where I endlessly whinge and moan about what’s going on and how I feel. I could write a lot of very intense and poetic posts on feeling like crap and hoping against hope that I’m going to get better. They’d be full of vivid imagery (two days ago I was actually feeling like my own self-sacrifice on a funeral pyre – dramatic, right?) and you’d write me lovely, supportive comments.

However, I think that’d be a doing myself and my readers a disservice. That’s not to say that I won’t ever write about my bad days any more, but just not all of the time. Because something is shifting in my perspective on suffering – more on that when I’m better able to articulate it.

Anyway, you guys…

Can you believe I’ve been blogging now for three years??!! That aint half-bad as far as milestones go, right? So, hooray!

I was reading about 10 year old Eli Knauer the other day. I realised that had blogs existed when I was ten, I totally would’ve had one.

For me, blogging began right around the time I was diagnosed with PTSD, when I was finally getting the help I needed, or at least I was beginning to. Instinctively, I also knew that self-expression was important. Trauma brings up so much stuff – and not just surrounding the actual trauma itself.

So what am I saying here?

I think being heard and having a place to express whatever needs to come out is an important part of the healing process.

Last weekend I was visiting my sister and nieces, and my eldest niece gave me one of her latest coloured squiggly line drawings. This time she’d written her name in shaky yellow letters with the Y turned upside down (not bad for a four year old!). I praised her efforts and thanked her for making me a drawing. The look on her face was beautiful – she was bursting with pride and happiness. Self-expression. Love.

I think that the suppression of our feelings is where dis-ease with life begins. It’s something we learn to do very early in life – especially if you’re a “too sensitive” type – and our emotion-hoarding grows as we do. It’s unhealthy.

As such, I’m very grateful for my original impulse to start blogging. Sometimes my urge to write burns holes in my fingers and other times I need peace and quiet, even from my own words.

I continue to be awed and amazed by the friendships I’ve made as a result of blogging (and Twittering). People that I now love just as much as any IRL friend. You folks know who you are and if you’re not sure, let me know and I’ll tell you! 😉

And just know that if I ever win, inherit or otherwise obtain large sums of money, I’m gonna fly you all in to a private tropical island for one heck of a blog meet up. There’ll be yoga, meditation, good food, rest, massages, music, walks in nature and cheesey DVDs to watch (Buffy, Charmed, Gilmore Girls, Supernatural, True Blood etc etc).

Until then, I’m sending virtual group hugs out to one and all. Thanks for reading and thank you for becoming a valuable part of my life.

*mwah*

~Svasti xxx

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You’ve come a long way, baby

Tags

Asana, bird’s eye view, Blogging, Depression, Fat Boy Slim, Happy blog birthday, Healing, Meditation, Nataraj, Natarajasana, Post, Post-traumatic stress, PTSD, Recovery, Retreat, Spirituality, Therapy, Trauma, Truth, Unemployed, Yoga, yoga teacher training, Yogasana

For years I was totally hopeless with balancing asana in my yoga practice. I’d wobble, fall over and enviously look at others, wondering why I couldn’t do what they did.

Then some time ago, wobbling through Natarajasana (dancer pose) I had a realisation that changed everything… You’re not just trying to balance on one leg – you need to stabilise yourself by engaging every little piece of your body!

Oh! Seems so obvious in retrospect, but for some reason I really didn’t get that, until I did.

In turn, this taught me something important about life, in a very practical (not theoretical) way: Nothing in our lives is disconnected. Nothing.

Funnily enough, I’ve had this realisation many times – during meditation, from reading books and listening to dozens of lectures on the matter too.

Seems we don’t get it, until we do. Nothing is disconnected.

We’ve come a long long way together
Through the hard times and the good
I have to celebrate you baby
I have to praise you like I should
~Fat Boy Slim

For those of us consciously trying to heal our inner wounds, with our fragmented selves desperately trying to keep up… we’re often so busy focusing on the trauma, it’s hard to see the bigger picture.

Just for now though, I’m taking a bird’s eye view, trying to see the lay of the land, so to speak.

Why? Well, today marks the first birthday of Svasti! Hip-hip-hooray!!

To quote my last post, this blog grew as something of an impulse – a very strong desire to save my sanity. A much needed space to expel the violence, sadness and struggles I’d been dealing with all alone. Screaming into cyberspace seemed like a good idea, and I was right.

Blogging I’ve found… is sort of like travelling the world with an entirely different perspective. Instead of seeing museums and temples and the like, I find myself surveying the inner workings of people’s minds all ‘round the world.

In the process, I’ve made a lot of friends and learned plenty about myself and others.

Such as: There’s no simple cure to PTSD or depression. And there’s peaks and troughs to recovery. The peaks make me feel like I’m finally getting somewhere. The troughs make me feel like checking out of Hotel de Life.

Healing is not a one-shot deal. There’s no magic pill to solve all my ills, or anyone else’s. But the more we express, the better it gets (in the long run, if not straight away).

And given human nature is how it is, we find resonance in each other’s words. We discover we aren’t alone. We’re all connected. So, what we write can benefit others. That’s a good thing!

But I’ve also learned the assault I started writing about was only a small part of the story – a kind of bookend really, to a certain era of my life. An era I’m learning I need to write about. That’s all connected, too.

In the last twelve months I’ve: started therapy, quit a stable (but soul-destroying job), spent five weeks in spiritual retreat, conquered the worst of my PTSD symptoms (although I’m far from symptom-free), gained and lost another job, had a second niece arrive, found new friends, started yoga teacher training and struggled with a very morbid attack of depression. And I’ve spent the better part of this year unemployed, surviving on a fraction of what I usually earn.

Seems I’ve been shedding one skin after the other, kinda like an onion and with just as many tears.

But none of it is disconnected, I’m convinced of that. Where we’re at is a result of where we’ve been. There’s no plot device that led me down this path.

Gotta say this much – it’s a glorious place from which to find my balance in life, and I know I can do it.

So, here’s to the next twelve months in my/everyone else’s journey.

And thanks everyone for reading!

~Svasti