Big life

Mental health

In another life, I lived on a tiny island called La Maddalena. One summer evening, the heady scent of wild gorse in the air, I flew around the island on the back of a friend’s scooter. ‘Che vuoi fare da grande?’ he yelled into the sea-fresh wind, thousands of tiny stars twinkling in the sky above as we sped on into the violet night.

My Italian wasn’t great then. I translated it literally, ‘What do you want do… in the big?’ (It means: What do you want to do when you grow up?’). I told him I wanted to write. I wanted to ‘be’ a writer.

Life took over: or more accurately, mental illness took over. I spent much of the next decade profoundly depressed. It wasn’t a mild, nagging grey cloud over my head. It was massively debilitating, utterly disabling. My whole spirit totally suffocated under its power. Often, I couldn’t even rouse myself from sleep. I threw away years being depressed, but I didn’t have a choice. I really didn’t understand how to get well.

This is the monumental might of human emotions. If you let them overwhelm you, they can be so powerful and so dangerous. There aren’t many solutions offered for young people who are struggling with mental illness. At the time, I didn’t understand what was wrong with me. I thought I was incredibly lazy. I thought I had an undiagnosed disorder that made me sleep all the time.

The truth is that the weight of my thoughts had left me physically immobilized. It would be many years before I started to get well. I tried many different ways of trying to recover. Having children gave me a new determination not to succumb to the devil and the dark. Meditation started to heal my brain. I could feel it happening. And each time I do it, I feel it happening still.

I will scream and shout

Motherhood

How do you deal with toddler tantrums? Actually, are they really toddler tantrums? My baby has them and my five year old has them. In fact, I have them too.

I *almost* had one this morning when the google maps app thing on my iPhone 1) went mysteriously silent so I couldn’t hear the directions but had to assimilate them into my being while driving and 2) Took me on a weird, ill-thought out goose chase to a house which was less than 10 minutes’ drive away but nestled, camouflaged, in a maze of tiny streets.

It’s the small things that derail you when you are trying to hold your shit together as a parent. God, kids are really cute and all – I mean, they are ridiculously cute with their baby bellies and their lispy half-baked sentences – but there’s nothing adorable about tantrums. This morning, I was treading on eggshells, terrified of upsetting the three-year-old because I have a cold and therefore my coping strategies are down. It didn’t work, he pulled a record of one tantrum every few minutes or so for the whole first shaky hour of the day.

I’ve learned that if I lose it after he loses it, he will lose it even more and we will be upping each other on our losing it into infinity. It’s no good. Meanwhile, endless patience sometimes feels like giving in. He’s being unreasonable, and bossing me around. I could be raising a brat. Both of my older boys do this ‘Uggggggh’ guttural sound when they are angry, which they ape directly from me. I mean, these children just copy us a lot of the time. Yes, they have those absurd and explosive tantrums unique to toddlers, but they are still little carbon copies of us.

It shocks me that many of the reactions I have to my own children are precisely the ones my mother had with me. We imprint our ways of being on our children every moment we are with them and once knotted in, they are hard to unravel.

It’s a lot of pressure isn’t it?

I hang on to meditation like a life buoy in an ocean of dodgy learned behaviours, automatic reactions, and those adult-y tantrums which are so much more restrained – and so much more dangerous. I hang on to it for dear life in the belief that I will have a hope in hell of changing my brain, and therefore teaching my children a better way to be in the world.

Brain problems

Mental health

It’s so predictable. Your brain will tell you in a thousand different ways all the reasons why it’s a great idea not to do something that is good for you.

Take writing this post now, for example. My brain is being super helpful this morning. Honestly, it’s really cheering me on, lobbing uplifting ditties such as ‘What’s the point?’ ‘You’re sick, just rest’ ‘It’s Sunday, who’s reading this, anyway?’ and the classic, old reliable ‘Just to do it tomorrow, instead.’

I’ve been following that ‘Do it tomorrow’ command like a mole who has lost its way home for most of my life. It is lethal. Willpower is a muscle that you must use otherwise it drowns, suffocates, dies… whatever way you want to put it. It is a recent revelation to me that you get things done by doing them.

It’s the quintessential move from the depressive mind: Fix it tomorrow. Before children, I used to spend hours in bed, not sleeping, but trying to fix my problems. By thinking about them. It’s called rumination. It sucks. You build crappy neural networks and highways, constantly reinforcing the bad stuff with really dodgy construction work. I was convinced that if I thought about things for long enough, I would find a solution.

Thoughts are so seductive. They really will have you believe that it’s to your benefit to sit and think about the same things, over and over again, until they are ‘solved’. That they can actually seduce you into putting off stuff to an eternal tomorrow is truly astonishing.

Sometimes I think thoughts and action are two such opposing states that one is death, the other is life.

Doctor, doctor

Mental health

One thing worse than being a hypochondriac is being a hypochondriac who has been diagnosed with a major health problem.

I don’t know that meditation helps with this, so I’m not going to talk about being plugged into the universe or finding peace within yourself. I’m going to talk about how bloody annoying it is. Hypochondria is another of the litany of mental health disorders I have, and sometimes it gets so bad I feel that I am on the verge of death. My brain frequently flashes forward to me being diagnosed with whatever I have too late, and dying.

Today, I’m worried that the fluttering in my heart is a sign that I have a serious heart problem. Last week, I went to see a skin specialist after months of wrestling the fear that the ‘lesion’ on my back was skin cancer. I have ‘sticky blood’ so I worry about getting a clot, even though a specialist has told me that my crazy leg growth, made up of a giant network of tangled blood vessels, will ‘unlikely’ leech a clot into my arterial system, instead continually clotting within itself. I worry, that somewhere inside me, cancer is growing. That I am blanking out a lot because I have early onset Alzheimer’s. That my gallbladder issues are going to shorten my life. That the giant hemangioma on my liver is not innocuous, as a liver consultant assured me, but something far more sinister.

After all of the births of my sons, this health anxiety worsened. There are lists upon lists on my iPhone, things like ‘ask about darkened patches at top of leg’ or ‘ask about stabbing pain in stomach – is it an infection’ or ‘ask about bouts of breathlessness’. There are actual, real health diagnosis and then there is a plethora of thoughts about them, with embellishments. Right now, the thoughts feel more harmful to my health than the diagnosis themselves.

You battle mental illness on all fronts. You need to be like a ninja, constantly brandishing different weapons and strategies just to survive the day – just to survive your life. One mental disorder goes hand in hand with another. You don’t just get the gift of depression, you’ll get a sideshow of anxiety or a good nip of OCD to go with it. You’ll have hypochondria, and its playmate will be panic.

There are solutions to the shitshow inside your head. I am committed to finding them. We are here to master our minds, not the other way around.

Only connect

Meditation

As a child, I found Catholicism appealing. It was dramatic and scary. There was the crucifixion. The resurrection. Taking holy communion on a Sunday and being told you were actually eating the body of Christ. The spectre of sin hanging over you, coupled with the thrilling fact that you were probably sinning quite a bit, but you’d be forgiven for it. As long as you confessed it.

I loved the singing. Lines from hymns pop back into my head often, like this one: Be still and know that I am God. In primary school at lunchtimes, I even used to go into the church next door. I’d sing with other small, similarly bewitched friends. We’d do the stations of the cross. We felt very holy.

I grew into my teens. I drank. I smoked. I had sex. I lied. None of it married well with Catholicism, even though in between bouts of extreme sinning, the ingrained doctrine meant I felt incredibly guilty and sorry a lot of the time. As an adult, there is a Catholic part of me that cannot be removed. It’s tattooed into my cells. I’ve made peace with it, scraping by with my own patchwork version that’s female-friendly, all-inclusive and without a paedophile in sight.

What was present in me as a child – faux-holiness and all – and then missing as a teen and young adult, was simply this: Spiritual connection. I see now that it’s what I was desperately looking for when I was drinking heavily, or having yet another doomed love affair, or succumbing to the somnambulance of depression. I needed to find a connection to something that had already been inside of me all along.

I catch glimpses of it now. Wispy and dark clouds part in rapid winds, revealing a periwinkle perfect sky. During meditation, I sense the isness of the self. Like the trunk of a tree or the foundation of a carefully built house. It is stillness absolute – and yet it vibrates as fast as the wings of a hummingbird, sucking nectar from the infinite offerings of the earth.

The Walden of suburbia

Meditation

‘To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts.’ So said the great Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Each day, during his two-year sojourn in a long cabin in the woods near Walden Pond, he would get up to bathe in the pond at dawn, calling it his ‘spiritual discipline… a religious exercise and one of the best things I did.’

Now, I’m sure he didn’t necessarily want to do it every morning. I’m quite certain some early, pitch-black deep cold mornings he woke up and thought: There is just no effing way I’m getting into that pond. I’ll do it tomorrow, I’ve got, like, forever to do this.

But he did it. Every morning.

I like to read about other peoples’ daily routines. I’m an absolute sucker for those ‘I’m winning at life’ spiels you read about, you know, I go to the gym, run, drink a turmeric shot, smear chia seed jam over my face, deal with all my emails, all before 4am. I’ve been reading them for years, but the most fundamental habit I wished I could adopt was simply ‘I get up early.’ I love the idea of those pencil-quiet morning hours, profoundly peaceful moments in which you can create your hopes for the day ahead, and by default for your life. But I’ve never been able to get up early. In my 20s and 30s, I took lie-ins to the max; there were lie-ins so epic that the promising pink of the day would regularly fade into the stifling dark of the night (this is depression).

Now, I have no choice about getting up at Silly o’clock because of my three babies. I’m awake by around 6am, so getting up ‘earlier’ would mean 4am and not much sleep. That will change. Until then, I affect the quality of the day by meditating each day, without fail. It is my spiritual discipline and the rock that I sit on daily – staring into my own version of Walden Pond, a refreshing dip into the reliable immensity of the universe.

The (four) barbers of Seville

Meditation, Motherhood

When my eldest son and I came out of the cool, hipster new barbers’ near where I live yesterday, he hung his head and quietly said ‘I look like Violet Beauregarde. But that’s ok.’

Well, it was not ok with me. He wasn’t going for his first school photo today with a retro 20s bob – no way! Being afraid of confrontation as I am (meditation is not a panacea) I took him straight to another barber. She assessed the situation in a fraction of a second and barked out ‘I don’t do corrections here. No way. Cutting kids’ hair is hard enough.’ We left.

I took him to a third barber, who looked at my son and nodded sagely. I thought no words were needed, really. It was clear that my son’s awesome, shaggy cut had been hacked into a style more suitable for a grande dame of fashion like Anna Wintour and not a 5-year-old at the tail end of his Junior Infants year. I turned for a moment to the other two boys, who were running wild with clutches of free lollipops in their hands, and by the time I turned back, this barber had merrily hacked off all of the hair on one side of my son’s head.

So this is when I totally lost it. Something exploded inside of me, an absolute fireball of foul temper. A beat passed. The barber looked at me, scissors hovering over the child’s head. ‘You didn’t want… short?’ he asked hesitantly. No, no, no I raged and wept internally. In real life, I calmly said, ‘Ok, you must have misunderstood me. We need to even it up now and make the best of it.’ But then, I legged it – three straggly, sticky boys in tow: he’d brandished the buzz cutter thing with clear intentions to completely decimate what was left of my son’s floppy, wavy blonde hair.

We went to a fourth barber. He was a broad and big man called Teeno. He took one look at Kit’s hair, shook his head, whistled, exhaled and said: ‘Let’s fix this.’ He gave my other two sons cars to play with, he made me a coffee. His lollipops were shaped like feet, so the boys were beside themselves. He made my (patient) son’s hair look normal again.

Meditation boosts this thing called adaptation energy. It gives you more rope to work with before you snap. It’s all relative; I get that hair is not a big deal. But before I started a regular meditation practice, I would have probably lost my temper at barber No.1, barber No.2 or barber No.3. I’d most likely have cried when barber No.3 lopped the entire side of my son’s hair off. And I might not have been quite as ecstatically grateful when barber No.4 – Teeno the Conqueror – remedied the whole mini-saga with lollipops shaped like feet, coffee and some skillful cutting.

Having that little bit of extra rope elevates your daily life, making things easier for yourself – and so for everyone around you.

Treeclimbing

Meditation

Do you notice trees? Often I do, and I’ve been doing it a lot more in the last few years. There is something about meditating that gently prods you into noticing nature more.

Why is this? It’s probably because it helps you see that you are part of nature. I know that sounds a little annoying, a random platitude. The ‘me’ from, say, five years ago would probably be rolling her eyes upon reading this. She’d mentally check out, her eyes scanning over the rest of the words without really reading them. ‘Yeh, yep, we are part of nature. Snore. Whatever the hell that means.’

But it’s true. We are. I can sometimes see this – I mean really understand it. Not all of the time. Not in the lightly grisly moments of everyday life, when I’m shouting dire and dark warnings to the kids like, if you touch your seatbelt again, there will be no more Lego. Ever.

Since I started meditating, I’ve started to really dig nature more. The two just go together. I look at a tree and think a lot about how it’s been there for a long time before me and how it will be there for a long time after me. And flowers. Sheesh. Don’t get me started. I thought they were pretty before but now often I will stare at them for a number of minutes and think: ‘Who made you so beautiful?’

And when you start to meditate you see – as Rumi wrote in What Was Told, That: What was said to the rose that made it open was said/to me here in my chest – that which made the trees, the flowers, the beautiful, exquisite planet… made you.

Put a sock in it

Meditation

The sock situation when you have three small children is out of control. In our house, a pair of socks is worn once and then rarely reunited.

The baby wears my socks sometimes. I wear the boys’ socks sometimes. I’m pretty sure my husband has gone to work with one of my socks uncomfortably stretched over his foot at some point. He’s long squirreled away a secret stash of brand new socks somewhere that I have no access to because as soon as I get my grubby hands on them, it’s game over.

Dotted around the house, there are bags of teeny tiny socks. Stuffed in Tesco bags. A little dinosaur drawstring bag. Gift bags, cloth bags. The socks pile up, procreate in the washing machine, and come out in multiples with no other half in sight. The bag thing works fairly well. Anybody who needs socks will now trot happily to the nearest bag station to select a non-pair of socks.

I think the socks are like thoughts in your brain before you meditate. All different sizes and colours: big fluffy winter offerings, skinny fluorescent slip-of-things, mean little black ones, cosy and solid stalwarts; tattered, elegant grey ones. It’s a bit of a mess in there. Sometimes when you are meditating, you get the feeling you have pulled a matching pair out of your brain bag. All those thoughts, tumbling around, become reunited and your brain feels like it’s been put back together again, briefly in perfect harmony.

Matched up with the universe.

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

Meditation

In her poem, The Fourth Sign of the Zodiac, Mary Oliver talks about the urgency of living.

She asks: Do you need a prod?/Do you need a little darkness to get you going? And then brutally reminds us that such a vibrant soul as Keats died at just 25.

None of us have much time. We really don’t. I’m sure most of you have been reminded of the lack of time we have on this planet. Often it happens when someone very close to you dies, or when you get a frightening medical diagnosis. For me, it was the latter. It wasn’t cancer, as prompted the urgency in Oliver’s poem, but it was something utterly left-field, something bananas, a one-in-a-million medical condition that finally explained why I had been living with intermittent, excruciating bouts of pain for all of my adult life.

During the weeks of diagnosis, the scans and the being pinged from one grim consultant to the next, there loomed the possibility that whatever it was I had would kill me (It didn’t. It won’t). It was unbelievable and it was totally unbelievable how my mindset instantly changed.

Time became distilled. I couldn’t believe I’d had a complaint about anything before – literally anything. Everything seemed like a special, priceless gift that was about to be snatched away from me. I got down on my knees and prayed every night (and during the day, and every hour) to God to let me stay alive and healthy to look after my sons. To let me live the life that until the week before, when a scan had found a gigantic growth wrapped around the sciatic nerve in my leg, I’d been a bit ‘meh’ about.

Yes, really. I dared to be ‘meh’ about my one wild and precious life, my adorable, bolshy little sons, my practical, kind husband, my sensitive, whip-smart stepdaughter, and about my tumbly tiny terraced house in the centre of the city.

I’m not going to die anytime soon. Or I might. Who knows? Any one of us, at any time, could die or become ill, or something could happen to one of our loved ones.

It is impossible to live at the intensity of ‘I might die’ every day, or even for a moment – but having experienced what it is like, its imprint is inside of me, somewhere. It’s yet another reason why I meditate. It is so incredibly comforting. When you do it regularly, you slowly start to become aware that death cannot exist.

Because there is a part of us that can never die.