people dont “get better”

i woke up this morning thinking about some amazing women that i was damn lucky to be friends with in DC, and how leaving to “get better” and take care of my family, i lost touch with them.

i thought that “getting better” meant i was never gonna feel bad, have the overwhelming need to just crawl into bed and cry, ‘fake it’ through another day again. what i realized this morning was that no one really gets better, we just learn to deal with what we feel. i have spent a year trying to fight the feelings that i have to make them go away, being ashamed of those feelings and my beliefs about personal failure that those feelings bring up (depression, panic, etc.). i fell into some bad spots again about three months ago, and felt that slide again over the last week, where every moment in your head its you vs. you and there’s no room for the rest of the struggle.

i am tired of thinking about the things that are wrong with me, about “what happened” to make me this way. i am excited to take all the skills i have shoved in my pocket to stay alive the last 25 years and really pull them out and look at them- and use them to feel joy and carry that around with me and share it as much as i can, not by hiding the other feelings that are there but by allowing them.

maybe this sounds like hippie woo-woo shit so let me just try and break down a real concrete example- when i’m fighting myself about a negative emotion or belief in my head “you failed at x because y” – i do a lot of things- i slouch, i dont make much eye contact, i dont really listen, i fake laugh sometimes and i worry about/ask about other peoples stuff excessively cause i can’t even find words for my own.  all of these things are big walls to showing people love- to them feeling heard/knowing i’m listening, without feeling like they gotta lay their guts on the table and tell me “whats going on.” sometimes when i’m asking that i think i’m desperate to hear about other peoples pain and how they deal, and i write off silliness or stories of the day as ‘superficial’ or ‘not real’ but whats really going on is i don’t know how to allow myself to feel those hard things so i’m looking for them in someone else.

so what i woke up realizing without attaching a lot of judgy-pants statements about myself to it is that i had not accepted yet that i could feel things that were shitty and still be the person that i wanted to be if i just accepted those things or accepted that i wasn’t going to reach some perfect state where i didn’t feel any of that. and that striving for that, and pushing that shit down in a way that i couldn’t hear, be with, or love many people in my life has cost me a lot and i’m DONE WITH THAT. 🙂 here’s to learning to live and fight together, not fight yourself.

and as communities, if we can hear each other, and be on the lookout for ways of being together and ways of working that keeps people from really being there, we can keep our minds present and feeling the whole range of things that help us use all our human capacity to fight together for each other. i’m going to try to remove the phrase “get better” from my vocabulary, at least in the mental health realm,  entirely. i feel better already.

ayurvedic medicine and depression

i’m always looking for more resources about natural medicine and mental health…I recently picked up a great book about ayurvedic medicine and depression called Healing Depression the Mind-Body Way by Nancy Liebler….here’s some notes from it!

ayurveda (oldest system of natural medicine), says that while meds and talking ease the symptoms you must also addresses the imbalance in your body that causes depression. Thinking about what you experience as a depletion or blocking of certain energy not a broken brain or a pathologized ‘profile’ of a depressed person….

each balance of doshas is unique. Depression in each kind of imbalance also looks different.

 

VATA

associated with movement, very attuned to changes of seasons and dark and light. Guides the body’s adjustment to change and communication between internal and external.

Imbalance/depression– loss of enthusiasm and anxiety. Difficulty falling asleep, feeling overwhelmed and out of control. Problem = lack of stability in life patterns, or difficulty in sustaining a major life change. Techniques is to nourish physiology/ nervous system back to stability.

 

PITTA

trans formative processes of mind-body, converts food to energy but also processing of experiences and energy, basis of our metabolism.

Imbalance/depression- metabolic processes are blocked, irritability and frustration can mask sadness, sleep disrupted and internal perception is of having blocked possibilities. Root may be approaching life with extreme intensity and pattern of overdoing, techniques for balance are literally and figuratively cooling off the physiology- deep rest.

 

KAPHA

strength and cohesion, holds everything together from connective tissues to stamina/stability, stability and stamina of our emotions and processing.

Imbalance/depression- feeling weighed down, lethargy, lack of interest and overly sentimental = feeling stuck, excessive sleep, techniques are to overcome inertia by purification treatments.

 

Balance enables you to process emotions and difficulties just like you would food. Doing meditation and yoga to maintain body awareness, and using nutrition to your body’s advantage (what is your disposition?) can optimize what this author calls your “emotional metabolism”

 

Practices that restore balance include:

 

-Breathing: alternate nostril breathing for two minutes because it forces feedback/connection between two parts of the brain….described by a friend in my meditation class also as useful for controlling panic attacks because it moves your reaction from front brain to back brain (or maybe the reverse, I’ll have to look it up.) But basically panic and anxiety come from the reactive survival part of your brain, very deep, and you can balance or calm it by moving your focus to observing details in the present. More cool breathing exercises listed….look up yoga breathing, or humming breath and victory/ujayi breath.

 

-Exercise- restores blocked or stuck metabolism, deeper breathing, better digestion.

For Vatta imbalance focus should be on restorative exercise like yoga, biking, and walking. Like increases like, people want to do what they are pre-disposed to: anxious people like running and hard exercise to amp them up or give them energy to deal with overwhelming schedules. Over-excercise can overheat and exhaust physiology. Vinyasa yoga that holds poses briefly and focuses on breath and being mentally present.

For Pitta cooling activities like swimming are helpful, and focusing on fun enjoyable exercise rather than goal oriented- like a certain number of laps or distance. Dont do super aggressive yoga like hot yoga, smile and have fun with it- not taking poses too seriously, focus on the exhale to release heat.

For Kapha stimulation is needed to break intertia, so lots of music and aerobic activity and weight training are helpful. Focusing on alignment to stimulate your mind and opening heart.

 

-Food: do not eat until previous meal is digested (3-6 hours), avoid large amounts of liquid, lunch the largest meal of the day cause your system is most ‘warmed up’ and not about to shut down for sleep, eat to only 75% full (need oxygen in digestive process), avoid large quantities of raw foods, avoid iced and carbonated beverages, and chew well. Eating when you are present to do so (SIT DOWN and eat slowly), also eating at a regular time is important.

when the past is present…

just finished a pretty great book about transference, or basically how your past affects your relationships. kinda timely for me to read, as i am kind of in a make it or break it moment with someone and have been having trouble understanding my own reactions to her and trying to be more consistent.

SO—- with that little bit of context— what’s transference?

Looking for healing from a past hurt or something that you didn’t get or have in someone in the present. Looking in the wrong places for healing by looking outside instead of in.

I have strong beliefs about the power of communities to support individual healing, and I think for a long time I carried around an unhelpful belief that someday I would get from some community what I didn’t get from my community in DC. While I’ve had brief moments and reminders that no one can take care of you but yourself, I think it wasn’t until somewhat recently that I really grew into my own skin around that belief, and connected that everything I do for myself to stay strong is something that I do for my community. If I’m not doing that work however, I can start to feel depleted and start looking for that in others almost faster than I realize what’s out of balance for me.

David Richo, the author of the book When the Past is Present, says we develop expectations around whether or not the ‘five A’s’ were fulfilled when we were little: attention, acceptance, appreciation, affection and allowing (us to be ourselves).  We seek those things until we find them, but without that basic foundation we can be more likely to despair or have shaky faith in ourselves than find hope.  Clues for transference are those feelings that you can’t put your finger on, or emotions that don’t seem to have a source. This is because we remember events in our bodies as much as in our heads.

There are lots of cool ‘practices’ for dealing with transference in this book, I’d like to share the ones I found most helpful

APRI- Address, Process, Resolve, Integrate- (for conflict)

Address- call the problem by name, identify it. Process the feelings associated with the event, without losing control and take responsibility for your own emotions without blaming others. Resolve- happens by taking the steps mentioned and beginning to practice them or being aware of needs in the future- can be a bit rocky, rusty, learning a new skill. Integrate- implementing what you agreed to work on consistently, get comfortable with it.

Looking at your presence

Questions to ask yourself to find out if you are in the moment or reliving the past…”Am I paying attention or planning what to say next? I am noticing both the words and the body language/emotions?” “Am I judging them? Am I taking something they are working hard to do for granted?” “Am I trying to control or elicit a certain reaction in them?”

Practice mindfulness by noticing qualities about the other in the moment “she is standing, she is wearing blue, she is looking left” allows us to refocus on now. Repeat back what you heard to make sure you are correct is another good practice that avoids reacting.

Beliefs you may carry from your past:

‘global critic’- if we didn’t find consistent reactions to certian actions when we were younger sometimes we decide that unexplained reactions, disappointments, etc., must mean that we are the problem not a specific behavior. SO we slip into a ‘global critic’ of ourselves…if something is bad or wrong its always bad or wrong. we might also avoid speaking up for this same reason, a way to keep ourselves safe from unpredictable reactions- we wait until we are sure the time is right.

Feeling powerless by tensions like wanting to run and having to stay. However, a cool thing mentioned in this book is that the critical voice usually comes in words we heard which are from the left side of the brain. We can counter that with our right hemisphere, which has to do with felt senses, our body and feeling grounded. An easy one is paying attention to your posture or stretching. Also meeting triggers with anchors- words you can say to yourself that bring up a felt sense of happiness or grounded-ness that will connect you with your body again.

one idea from this book that blew my mind was talking about object permanence, or how babies learn that when an object disapears it doesn’t mean it is gone forever. but truly the baby is learning to trust themselves that the object will return, to trust THEIR knowledge without seeing. same with relationships, but if you never had this or it was broken in some way by your experiences you may really struggle with disappointment or rejection as abandonment.

Things that are hard for all humans-

comings and goings, giving and receiving, being accepted and rejected, and letting go and moving on. no matter what your past these things bring up major and deep beliefs about how trustworthy the world is and how much we trust ourselves. setting up small victories for yourself like imagining fears of what might happen in one hand, what you plan to make happen in the other, and between your hands the real you and what you will say yes to no matter what happens- facing down fears in small ways. some events are also to huge to unpack and thats ok too.

ok more on this soon hopefully (its sunny outside!)

more on managing mood swings

sometimes i have to remind myself of things i already know…

here’s some cool stuff i found today about the connection between nutrition and mental health:

1) if you are like me, when you get stressed out/exhausted, you crave sweet things or caffeine or cigarettes to give your body that ‘boost’ you aren’t giving yourself by sleeping or slowing down. BUT consuming sugar causes a spark in the glucose in your body (which is already charging out full force because the stress hormone cortisol causes glucose release). Too much glucose flying around and insulin being produced like crazy to keep up causes insulin resistance.*  Your cells stop responding properly to the insulin and don’t absorb the glucose, can’t get the glucose where it needs to go (like your brain!). This causes metabolic syndrome, which is common in people with depression and mood disorders, and may even be a factor in CAUSING mood disorders.

*exercise actually reduces insulin resistance, by helping your body learn to most efficiently move and burn fuel. So, in addition to the runners-high endorphin effect post-run, you are doing yourself some serious preventative work, like a dose of medication.

2) the thyroid: most people with depression and bipolar disorder should be treated for hypothyroidism, as it is often a cause for depression and can cause mood symptoms.  this is also a basic body function, if you take care of your thyroid all your other treatments “reach” your body better.

how to take care of your thyroid:

AVOID SOY

*sometimes I get tired of taking a million vitamins a day. So if you’re in a hurry or not trying to take a million things, remember your omega 3’s, which have both mood stabilizing and anti-depressant effects.  Also remember that other medical conditions mimic depressive episodes, such as pyroluria.

3) for a while I was really confident I was going to focus on kicking caffeine next after having quit smoking. i still want to avoid coffee because it makes my stomach crazy. however, a more important focus is alcohol- for its extremely damaging after effects on your mood. I have definitely experienced a lot of this already, but still sometimes drink when anxious at a party or more often when I am up and feeling good, which brings a nasty quick crash. Drinking (alcohol acts just like sugar in your body) WILL exaggerate the mood swings you already experience.

I just read this guy’s book (Dr. Jim Phelps) and while he’s pretty medication-oriented, he wrote these two great articles about light and exercise:

http://www.psycheducation.org/depression/LightTherapy.htm

http://www.psycheducation.org/hormones/Insulin/exercise.htm

Also, while he advocates medicine a lot in his book, he reminds us (by us i mean people who experience mood swings) that we shouldn’t turn to anti-depressants just to survive a dark spell (which only last weeks or at most a month usually) but focus on coping mechanisms (like the things listed above) that will help now and for the long haul.

Study.

The beginnings of a reading list for studygroup with Kara…

Healing and Organizing Traditions

Kindred Healing Justice Collective

Reflections from Detroit

Third Root in Brooklyn

Cure This

random compilation page of resources on healing justice

More coming soon!

media and healing

I am very excited to bring together the things that my life have been about for the last few years…making media, telling stories, healing myself and my community, and getting stronger.

I am working on some ideas about using radio and video here for healing and building community amongst military families, veterans, and active duty soldiers. I am thinking about how radio can provide practical resources and communication to folks who’s communications are monitored and who are often stigmatized for seeking support.

I’m gonna start a good list here of blogs that either use media to aid in the healing process and want to start researching media projects with trauma survivors, or how storytelling and group listening projects can help people both heal and take action.

I feel like there are a couple of different formats here, they are more informational/resource focused type media projects that are for ‘survivors of trauma’ ( like the Healing Combat Trauma blog or The Refuge Media Project ). These projects look really different depending on if they are made by civilians or veterans….I like this one, Winning the War Within, but it is made by a military family member not a veteran.  Then there’s the awful/dangerous realm of media made by civilians that sensationalizes PTSD or those struggling with it as ‘dangerous’…(see the coverage of shootings in Colorado Springs) or talk to me about shitty media coverage of Spc. Lookabill, Oregon National Guard Member killed by the police in Vancouver last month.

 

Resources from the Dart Center on media makers working with veterans or active duty folks:

How to Report on Deployment

When Soldiers Return

Books to check out:

Beyond the Trauma Vortex by Gina Ross (the media’s role in healing fear/violence)

i’ll be about it.

Giving thanks.

My day was kind of raw and hard. I just feel kind of sad and tired that yelling and hatred do not surprise me in my own home.

It does shock me, in the sense that I feel frozen and numb, and like I want to sink down into my roots and remember why I am here.

I talked to Emil about writing a phrase, something that would remind me of what that is, so when I wake up I know that the daily struggles here are a part of the bigger struggle, to not feel alone and to also feel patience. That this is a long road and I’m so happy to be on it, to know that it stretches on further than I can see.

So I guess what I’d write on my forehead/ceiling/hand/stick note these days would be something like this… “Every choice is a step in the struggle.” Each time you don’t pick up a cigarette, eat something healthy, help someone out or take a minute to actually hear/listen, is just as valuable as the time you spend planning, on the phone, in meetings, because each choice prepares you for those moments. Each choice gives you strength or information or a little more belief in yourself and in other people. Every time you can respond to anger or hurt or a threat with your heart, remember that it is as much what we do as how we do it.

I also like to remember that the phrase adelante, or forward, never says your path will be straight, or clear, and definitely not narrow. I am so grateful for this kind of learning, and I have a lot of people to thank for it.

Kara, Emil, Shelley, my housemates, Stout the dog and her endless patience, Taiga who always always speaks from her heart and pushes me to do the same.

What I want to be a done deal is still a process and what you can’t hurry is special and valuable and also in some strange way feels like it hurts because I have to actually look at parts of myself that need healing that haven’t been tended to in a long time, because I have now grown out of the survival stage into the growth stage and it involves bumping up next to others and roots intertwining and pain when those roots rip out or little tendrils break but how else do you grow but by reaching out and trying?

I am grateful to the people in my life who are reminding me that my actions mean so much more than my words, through their patience and warmth they show me the impact of my actions…because I am no longer some drowning person flailing about, I can finally see it. Thank you all for reminding me to be present and intentional with my time, living my values in the way I give my time to people and projects. I am figuring out how to show people that I love them. And I feel so so lucky. And also scared and it makes every moment like this exciting growing moment, if you pay attention to it.

Inside-Outside

This is something I wrote a long time ago and just found today:

I shrug on my backpack and get on the plane feeling like the 3000 miles are 3000 teeth being pulled. I feel like such a child, stumbling forward raw like the days I jumped on a greyhound without looking back. Starting out the window of the airplane it feels like an impossible distance, and one that feels more and more uncrossable, wider and wider, as I settle into my skin and look back on a time when I couldn’t feel my fingers much less my heart. Details are beginning to fade…street names, the bike map in my head that leads the quickest path from my old house to yours, remembering what happened first.

The embraces of friends and their eyes and words holds me as I keep taking steps, steps away from them but towards the same end, in the same struggle we are fighting for. We take care of each other best we can by fighting the things that divide and hurt us, each from our own trinchera.

I laughed and described it over the phone as a parallel universe. How you can get on a plane, get off a plane, and suddenly the love of struggle etched in your friends faces and hearts can be so hard to find echoed in new smiles, new concrete, smooth facades of new condos, the not-yet-trusting-gaze of new neighbors. To feel the heartbeat of a place, like sitting on the hill in Barry Farms and seeing the glow of the capitol building, knowing the broken concrete where I was sitting was the center of shifts to come.

So easily the words roll of their tongue “if you just come back to dc…” Like the city trying to hold me like the long painful breakup that parallels my departure. I love the city that taught me to fight, taught me to believe we can do it together…but then as we were just beginning to whisper about forevers…I pushed you away, or did you leave me? The bottom fell out of the edge that always drove me, the relentless energy that you loved burned me from the inside out. I wouldn’t let anyone see. I didnt know how to slow the flames/didn’t want to. The moments overlap and I cant remember what happened first. I still love you but I wont be back, until I learn to trust my own steps again, and to hold emotions and love and fear and not push or run, to feel it down into my fingertips. I can already breathe in a moment in a way I couldn’t, feel without falling, a fragile victory.

—-
I found this old piece of writing right when I needed it, when I’m gripped by fear about where to be next month.

I’m afraid to stay. Why? I see my mother numbing herself through TV and drinking, and I get scared cause she never wanted that. I see my father talk about social justice and then silence us at home and I am so afraid that staying here I will become the things I run from. Will I stand and fight and prove, or run and hide? It’s not even that black and white. I can’t explain it in words, but only in feelings. I don’t feel like things are quite real here, maybe cause the fight is stuck in my body and makes it hard to relate. I say Portland is stupid and she looks offended and I stammer and talk about class and white people, dripping with self hatred as I am talking about who I don’t want to be not who I am not.

From the Doris Zine, Cindy says basically learning to heal is a series of loops, each time you come around to the same situation with a few more tools. “There is a spiral like a spring that is the pathway out of entrenched ways of being, and you travel up the spring and you hit sections that are similar to what happened on the spiral below, but hopefully you have more tools each time, and at some point you just fly by without even noticing or getting stuck.”

So I am forgiving myself for how crazy hard this is, cause I am still alive and that says a lot about my ability to fight. I just have to be real that one thing that is no longer working for me is coping by creating a super effective busy adrenaline filled external life, or telling myself I’m only as good as what I do as an organizer.

I think I am equally boxed in here and there, as far as an external image that I fight to maintain, as teacher and organizer and the proving yourself that comes with being new. On a grumpy day, I feel less bad about letting people here down cause I don’t trust them as much, because of all they do not know or I have not allowed them to know. But how do I best support myself and not let myself down? I have to let people know where I am coming from and make decisions from my whole self, feel my whole heart when I speak.

So here’s to honestly finding a way towards unstuck.

Intimate Politics

I recently finished this incredible book called Intimate Politics by Bettina Aptheker. I felt for the first time since reading Outlaw Woman (Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz) and The Long Haul (Miles Horton) that crazy joy of finding words for the hardest thing for me to talk or write about…the connection between our hearts and the work we do, and how we take care of ourselves in the struggle.

Some excerpts that stuck out to me:

First, as an organizer, I didn’t know the history of Chicano Moratoriums in LA in 1969, antiwar demonstrations that linked police violence against people of color in the US to the war against people of color in Vietnam, and publicized the disproportionate casualties of people of color in the military. I feel excited about a history to the work that I am doing right now that I didn’t know existed, and to draw strength and ideas for more research into those stories.

The other pieces that stuck out to me were like taps on the shoulder, Bettina’s words echoing things I have said to friends about not understanding the militancy and rage which consumed me and gave me a passing confidence but often covered deeper wounds and dark thoughts.

Bettina discusses how comrades both in the party and in the Free Speech Movement discussed politics but shared little personal intimacy, and that the party provided no tolerance for personal problems. She also talks about an external and internal reality, externally a confident and visible organizer and internally lonely, confused and anxious, and being driven crazy by being ‘unable to reconcile the two realities.’ She talks about relief about being recognized as a person and not just as an organizer or Aptheker’s daughter.

As she begins to build relationships outside the party, the woman she falls in love with begins to study Buddhism. “I had left the Communist party only a year before, and without that political mooring I had known all my life, I felt myself buffeted on the high seas. Kate was discovering a new mooring, and I panicked at the spiritual sighting. Where was she going?” I have felt this fear when people I love find the rooting for themselves that I am still seeking.

Bettina is deeply skeptical of spirituality as a privilege of the upper class and feeling a deep guilt at taking time off, at camping and hiking, what she calls “spiritual crap and dead ends” when yelling at her partner. Her partner responds, “I am not you and you are not me,” her first understanding of what healthy boundaries do to keep us safe. She writes about the impact of love on her split selves- that the ability to love and trust someone in her life allows “the split between outer and inner realities to narrow. Once this happened for me, I was willing to take another small risk and then another and in this incremental way I grew stronger…”

There are just a few people in my life right now who hold the inside me, who know it and bring it out into the open so the body I walk around in and the things I offer others feels for even just a minute connected/rooted in something. To those people I can just say thanks for your love and patience.

you are stronger than you think you are.

A little update from a good friend in this struggle:
I still get sad

I wanted to adapt his exercise because I have been struggling so much about leaving this place where I feel safe for the first time in so long. The dynamics in Portland are frustrating and not a place I want to be for the long term, but I am equally afraid to leave this delicate process of healing and reassemble the pieces in a healthy way when I hit the ground in Baltimore. I have decided I am staying, decided I am leaving, and basically lived under a rock of indecision and not returned many phone calls over the last month, made plans with friends only to distract myself or desperately ground my body in something other than looping thoughts. I started smoking again, and I scared myself waking up feeling like slipping into other old self-destructive habits.

I have become an expert at deflecting questions and placating people over the last month, making plans to be two places at once, to lead workshops and make radio and start a new life 3,000 miles away…I’m currently paying rent in two cities and have felt completely unable to take small steps to contain these diverging realities and pick a path. I’m embarrassed to write it all down, but I have to. I have to remember all of this mess, and how to follow the thread of my heartbeat through all this darkness.

So, to borrow from my friend’s exercise…
The things I am saying about myself are:
I can’t be happy anyways so might as well throw myself at the struggle
Nothing I am doing here matters anyways, no one cares
I am doing less important work than other people
I can’t do it by myself, I’m afraid I’ll be more lonely here

The things I would like to change about this thinking:
I believe in the relationships I am building
I believe in my own strength, and ability to not just be there for everyone else but be honest with myself
I don’t have to define myself by what I am doing but by how I act with people, by BEING rather than DOING
The best thing I can give to the people around me and the people I fight alongside is to take good enough care of myself that I wont have to disappear again, and to learn to stay present with difficulty, and to really trust myself and my instincts about how and where to do this work

—–
These thoughts slipped through my fingers. Yesterday, today, I couldn’t get on the plane.
Yesterday I cried, and felt all the things I was leaving behind. Today I couldn’t feel, just acted. Drive to airport. Stare straight ahead. Get out on the curb. Can’t get my body to follow my brain’s orders. Unload your things, dont be afraid. Don’t go. Sleep.

Wait. feel. try to change.
My supervisor gave me the most beautiful piece of advice yesterday- that opportunity and stability are not opposing things, but that it might be time to start looking for opportunity IN stability- what new kinds of growth are possible by keeping your feet in one place for awhile?