Nimue Brown's Blog, page 12

Avoiding toxic misery

(Nimue)

Misery itself is inevitable in life, and often a fair response to experience. There’s nothing inherently toxic about misery. However as with most emotions, the issue is how we deal with it. There are a number of widely held ideas about misery that need strenuously resisting.

Misery can be presented as romantic, attractive and inevitable for anyone sensitive or thoughtful. While being sensitive and thoughtful means you are going to feel the woes of the world more keenly, you will also feel the good things more keenly too. If you treasure the good things and focus on gratitude, then there’s no reason for sensitivity to equate to constant misery.

We may be too willing to equate misery with depth. Again, there’s no real truth to this. Miserable people can be shallow and ignorant too. I suspect it is easier to be relentlessly miserable if you are self-obsessed, inward looking and selfish. The person who rejoices when good things happen to their friends, who delights in small beauties and cherishes the wins isn’t going to be that invested in their own misery.

This kind of thinking goes hand in hand with considering joy, laughter and happiness to be trivial and lesser emotions. It comes up a lot around the kind of books that are taken seriously as literature and the kinds that are treated as flimsy. Joy is not flimsy. Delight is vitally important and worthy of respect.

Misery is not a virtue. It does not mark a person out as being more serious, worthy or substantial. It is not proof of depth. Brooding mournfully has its place in gothic fiction but in real life it gets tedious really quickly, and there’s nothing romantic about it at all.

Around activism, you can find issues of people feeling they have to be constantly serious and fight the good fight and never have nice things because it all has to be about the revolution. This is emotionally exhausting and unsustainable. If your revolution has no place for joy, it’s just a new form of tyranny in the making.

One of the most toxic forms misery takes is when the person suffering wants everyone else to suffer too. I know a lot of people who have been through truly awful things, and the vast majority of them do not respond by wanting other people to share in that. Some become activists trying to protect others from the harm they suffered. Many are deeply compassionate in the face of other people’s pain, but also invested in making what good they can. The people who want others to share their misery – based on what I’ve seen – often haven’t suffered very much at all. It may be more about jealousy in face of other people’s happiness.

Joy is essential. Misery is unavoidable. Don’t let anyone persuade you that you do not deserve joy, or that your lack of relentless misery is some kind of shortcoming.

Feeling loved

(Nimue)

I’ve spent much of my life thinking that love was something that I felt for other people and that was the only way to experience it. Along the way plenty of people have told me that they loved me, but aside from being nice, it never seemed to mean anything much.

It turns out that there’s all kinds of interesting body chemistry that goes one around feeling good. Love, joy, hope, reward, happiness, contentment – these are chemical evens in our bodies that are triggered by our experiences. Or not, in my case. I’ve spent a lot of my life feeling hollow, disconnected, full of holes.

The last eighteen months of my life have been a rollercoaster of new and surprising experiences. I’ve felt things that I’ve never felt before – including feelings of reward, which my brain just never did in the past. It’s hard to be content when you don’t get a payoff for finishing things, or achieving things. The difference is huge.

As far as I can make out, feeling loved involves a wild cocktail of body chemistry. It softens and warms, soothes, comforts and encourages. In the past, my experiences of loving other people have usually involved experiences of pain, longing and melancholy. Love without those unhappy feelings is very different indeed and it’s taken me a while to relax into it and trust that love without suffering is real.

We all synthesise a lot of chemicals in our bodies that enable us to function. A lot of those are created in response to experiences that make us happy. If the day has regular doses of happiness in it then we are physically and mentally healthier. Our brain chemistry impacts in all kinds of ways on how our bodily systems self regulate. This isn’t bonus luxury stuff. This is essential to being able to function properly.

I no longer feel like I’m full of holes. I’m experiencing body chemistry in ways that make me feel whole and peaceful. Things that had seemed like personal shortcomings now look a lot more like they were environmental issues instead. I can be well, and happy and I don’t have to struggle all the time. I’ve still got health challenges to deal with, but it is all so much more manageable than it was.

Happiness is something we need to take seriously. It’s something we need to support each other around. How much mental distress could be alleviated if we allowed people to live lives that were good? What if we could get on with synthesising the chemicals our brains need to function, rather than being stressed and miserable such that we have to buy that stuff as pills?

Depression is not a personal failing. It’s often not even about our personal choices. If we created kinder, happier lives for everyone then a lot of distress would simply evaporate. Why, as a species, we are so intent on making each other suffer is a mystery to me.

Being and Doing

(Nimue)

In essence of course we all just are. However, humans are storytelling creatures. We particularly love telling stories about who we are and what our experiences mean. These are stories we tell ourselves, and quite often we tell them to other people as well.

I’ve run into quite a lot of spiritual material about putting down our sense of self to focus on the essence of being. I can see how that might bring benefits, but I’m also not sure that fighting those intrinsically human storytelling urges is a good idea. Maybe it would be better to work out how to tell more beneficial stories.

Internalised capitalism encourages us to tell stories about our use and importance. What we earn and what we consume are supposed to be key to our identities. This does no one any good, and there’s a lot to be said for just abandoning such stories.

I derive a lot of my sense of self from what I’m doing – Druidry very much included. Walking, performing, reading, writing, learning, crafting – this is all very much part of my sense of self. This has caused me challenges when illness has cost me some of those things, but hanging on to what I could did help me keep some sense of myself as being more than my unwellness.

I think one of the places people get into trouble is when they base their sense of self on what they imagine they are going to do. It’s very easy to tell stories about what we would do if only we had the time, the opportunity, the patience etc etc. It’s good to have aims and aspirations I think, but letting those take up a lot of space in your identity story can be really problematic. Having too big a story around what you’re going to do can be an obstacle to doing the thing, and it can distort your relationship with reality.

I feel that AI plagiarism really feeds into this, allowing people to develop a misplaced belief in themselves as creators while simultaneously robbing them of the incentive to truly create.

Druid blogger Cat Treadwell used to regularly ask ‘what are you doing?’ and it is a fine question. There is truth in action, in the choices we make and the things we show up for. What are you doing? Knowing yourself through your actions has substance. We might manage to delude ourselves for a while about what our actions mean, but there’s only so far you can go with not getting the results you thought you were going to get. If you aren’t really doing what you think you are doing, that’s inevitable.

The great advantage of focusing on doing as a source of identity stories, is that it encourages us to do interesting stuff. There’s real pleasure in having a good story to tell, and a life lived well is a life that will result in good stories.

Resting as a spiritual practice

(Nimue)

If you’re looking for a spiritual practice you can fit into a busy life, this is one of the best and most powerful choices you can make. Resting is good for your physical and mental health, and you need to be on top of that if you want to get the most out of a spiritual path. We’re embodied creatures, and respecting physical health and taking care of ourselves is, I would like to suggest, a good Druid practice for its own sake.

Resting is a way of spending time that has very little environmental impact. That’s a very good choice too. Your inactivity is of benefit to the planet, where activity may well not be. It’s an anti-capitalist choice that can give us the opportunity to escape from the pressures modern living causes and to take back more control of our lives.

We are mammals. It is in the nature of mammals to rest. Therefore resting is an excellent way of exploring nature as it manifests in your own body. Through rest you can connect with the lives of other animals, and empathise with them. You honour nature when you allow yourself to act naturally and when you respect nature within yourself.

Resting makes room for having ideas, so it can lead the way to inspiration. It also helps us process thoughts and feelings, which is often necessary to make space for meditation or prayer. Resting promotes calm, which in turn lends itself to spiritual work. Weariness can make us either apathetic or frantic, neither of which state is helpful.

Exhaustion makes everything worse, and harder, so tackling that first is a good investment for any kind of Druid work. Anything you might undertake as part of your Druidry is going to work better if you are well rested.

Slowing down allows to appreciate life more. The calmer we are and the more in control of our choices we feel, the more joyful our lives can be. Don’t let your Druidry feel like a weight you have to carry. Take care of yourself, and take the basics of wellness seriously and make that part of your path.

How to help in a crisis

(Nimue)

When someone is in emotional crisis, what can you usefully do? First up, avoid anything that is largely about making you more comfortable. Telling people it’s not so bad, or it will be ok, that they are over-reacting, or misunderstanding is likely to make things worse for them and can feel really dismissive. Even if you think something like that is true, don’t start there. Soothe and calm them first, then get into the details.

Reassurance is good. Saying things like: I’m here, you aren’t on your own with this. We will figure this out. Reassurance helps take the edge off panic, and despair. Making it clear that you are there to help can do a lot to help someone in a crisis. You have to be prepared to follow through on that.

If there are practical things you can do, get in for those. Tissues and warm drinks, a blanket, a cushion, or other small scale interventions help. It also affirms that you are serious about sorting things out. If something or someone is causing the panic, get your distressed person away from that as a priority. Put them in a space where they can feel safer and this will help them calm down.

Listen to them. Really listen. Try to establish what has caused the problem. Don’t be dismissive. If it seems small to you, that’s because you don’t have their experience. The same if it makes no sense to you. Taking someone seriously is an absolute power move for helping them recover.

The odds are there’s going to be a real problem underpinning things. How much of it is about historical experience and how much is happening right now needs figuring out. If a person has been triggered then the key thing is making them feel safely present and helping them establish that they are safe, and that they’ve been triggered. If there is a threat to them that needs dealing with. If someone has accidentally triggered them, that needs taking onboard. Refusing to learn how to avoid triggering other people is a shitty response to distress.

If the problem is happening right now, it needs taking seriously. One of the things that untraumatized people often struggle to recognise is microaggression. When the distress is caused by an apparently small thing it can be tempting to tell the distressed person they’ve over-reacted. However, when you encounter a lot of microaggressions, that becomes something far bigger and more impactful. Context can be very important here.

Sometimes people have meltdowns because their expectations are way off. They may be spoiled, irrational, over-reacting and all the rest of it. On the whole it is better to assume that isn’t the case. People experiencing distress are likely to be soothed by care and attention. People faking distress because they need care and attention have genuine issues too, and if you suspect that then the answer is to provide attention on other terms.

If it seems like someone is having meltdowns only to manipulate you into doing what they want, then that’s very complicated. It may be the better choice to back away and not engage. Having a tantrum because you don’t get your own way can be about lack of maturity rather than the desire to manipulate, but this level of malfunction may require more guidance than a non-professional person can manage.

Not everyone presents distress in the same way. It’s always worth taking the time to try and understand.

Tales Beyond Midnight

This is a collection of short stories by Kim Gravell – it came to me as a review book and I wasn’t previously aware of the author’s work.

The tales have occult and paranormal elements, some are more speculative, and one is distinctly Pagan in flavour. There are some forays into darker terrain – the first tale is about a suicide. It’s not a book to read if you are feeling incredibly delicate. The stories range widely and no two are alike. Each one comes with some commentary about when the author wrote it and why, which is interesting.

The tone varies a lot across the collection – some are darkly humorous, others deadly serious. Most are to some degree unsettling. Inevitably, some stories grabbed me more than others. I was deeply affected by one of the ghost stories, and some of these tales will haunt me for some time to come. Many of the stories set up scenarios that invite the reader to question and wonder – this is very much a collection for people who like thinking about things.

Here’s the author’s website with buy links https://www.kimgravell.com/tales-beyond-midnight

Diversity and echo chambers

(Nimue)

I’m over on Bluesky, where a lot of people are adopting a block and ignore policy for dealing with unpleasant people. Of course the ‘echo chamber’ accusations are flying about. Objectionable people often firmly believe that they are entitled to an audience, and that freedom of speech means being owed a platform.

It’s good to encounter diversity. We all benefit from exposure to different perspectives and experiences. However, that doesn’t equate to having to engage with hateful people. Haters aren’t very diverse at all, frankly if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all. They don’t do accountability, facts of evidence. They’re entitled, self important, into controlling other people, upset by diversity, threatened by anything that doesn’t look like them. Their takes on most things are misinformed and badly thought through at best.

You can safely leave them out and still experience a broad range of perspectives. There are plenty of reasonable people with informed takes whose views will differ radically to your own. There’s a lot to be said for creating opportunities to empathise with people who are very different to us. However, when someone is driven by hatred, about the only useful response is one of pity. Haters often present themselves as victims, yet have a great deal of privilege.

Many people out in the world have a lot of very good reasons for being angry. However, the key difference is that these are people who are *for* something. There’s something they want to build, or fix or improve. You’ll find them talking about the changes they want to make, and this usually looks like fairness, kindness, justice and the like. It can be about just trying to stay alive. Anger around injustice, abuse, oppression and genocide can be tough to encounter but also vitally important. We should be uncomfortable about these issues, and getting out of the comfort zone to hear this is important.

Protecting your own mental health is also important. The less comfortable you are, the more entitled you are to seek comfort. It is the people who are most comfortable in this world who need discomforting – these are also the people with the most power, and the most scope to change things.

You do not owe haters your time and attention. There’s very little point engaging with people who only want to cause harm and tear things down. You won’t persuade them rationally that they are out of order. You won’t appeal to their better natures, their conscience or their capacity for empathy. Many of them are simply bots anyway and exist to spread misery and cause anger.

We all have a finite amount of energy to deploy. Deciding what constitutes the best use of your time is a good idea. There’s not much of a case to be made for arguing with strangers online, and so many better things to focus on. Don’t be persuaded that you owe hatful people your time and attention, or that you need to understand them. There’s very little there to understand – they are neither original nor complicated – they just want to make you as unhappy as they are.

Meditation and thinking

(Nimue)

One of the difficulties I have with most meditation books is the focus on reducing how much thinking you do. I like thinking, and most of the time I like how my brain works. I struggle with my brain around anxiety and trauma triggers, but that’s largely a separate issue. I don’t want to be free from my thoughts.

I started meditating in my teens. I’ve spent most of my life being very deliberate about what goes on inside my head. The thoughts I have are careful, deliberate and intentional, and as a consequence I usually enjoy having them. Yes, my brain can do panic, catastrophising, hyper-vigilance and obsession, but when I’m not in highly stressful situations it doesn’t do that. The problem was always the stressful situations, not my brain.

Meditation books often talk about the process of calming thoughts, just observing them and not being attached to them. I realise that I’ve seen very little about what happens to you when you brain is pretty calm and when you can be conscious about your own processes. Rather than being thoughtless, being calmer gives you an entirely different experience of your own mind.

My approach to meditation has never really involved trying to shut my thoughts down, or for that matter observing them as though I am somehow an outsider within my own psyche. I have favoured deliberate contemplation of specific things – often things I have chosen because I find them soothing and/or productive. This process has given me a pretty calm brain, despite the trauma I have also experienced.

When my brain isn’t calm, I can use meditation tools to be deliberate about how I handle the inside of my own head. I can sit with my thoughts and give myself gentle space in which to deliberately work through whatever is going on. I find this helps me a lot in many ways – I don’t have to crush anything down or ignore it, I can square up to issues and consider what to do in face of them.

I continue to be mystified by spiritual teachers who treat thoughts as a problem to solve. It makes me wonder what goes on inside other people’s heads. I’m increasingly aware that I’ve never seen much about what happens when you calm your mind successfully, and even less about what happens when you manage to not have thoughts – but achieving that would be entirely at odds with writing a book about it.

I truly believe that thoughts are not an enemy to vanquish. Our minds are not a problem – some of our conditioning is. I advocate for being gentle with ourselves, and for a self-acceptance that includes the minds that we have, and the things those minds do. Being natural does not mean being thoughtless. Being present does not require a lack of thought. Presence itself is a form of deliberate brain activity. I’m very much in favour of getting to be deliberate about what we allow inside our own heads, but when you do that, thinking becomes a good thing. Deliberate thinking means joy, inspiration, curiosity, creativity, imagination, problem solving, excitement, hope and more.

Taking care of your soul

(Nimue)

When times are hard, joy is essential. Being in a constant state of anxiety or conflict will wear you down – it isn’t sustainable. Things that seem frivolous can be the difference between keeping going and giving up. The comfort and hope we find in the things that bring us joy are vitally important for our wellbeing, and especially so when the going gets tough.

It is so very important to take care of your soul. Nourish your heart with whatever sustains you. I was recently at a poetry and while some of it had an overt political dimension, a lot of it was just about people coming together in a room and sharing, and laughing together and feeling better as a consequence. We all need these kinds of spaces.

If you are going to be revolutionary, don’t demand that the revolution be miserable and austere and that we can only focus on serious and important things. Many very important things are not serious. Don’t let activism steal your joy or make you feel obliged to be weirdly puritanical.

In many ways, joy is what this is all about. The right to happily get on with your own life, free from oppression and not crushed by the wanton destruction of the planet. Joy is the goal, and we are more likely to get there if we don’t focus all of our energy on ‘fighting’. We need to build communities, practice cooperation, take care of each other, and create joy wherever we can.

It’s easier to be joyful when people set out to deliberately co-create it. It’s no good waiting for love, community and a better future to just magically happen. We have to build those things, day by day, welcoming and encouraging each other as we go. That means being able to laugh together, and sharing poetry and dancing and all of those other life enriching things.

Don’t be defined by the things you struggle against. Hold n to what gives you joy.

Contemplating need and oppression

(Nimue)

Looking back, I have been at my least kind and helpful during the periods where I was really struggling with unmet need. There’s nothing like fighting (and failing) to get your most basic needs met to make it hard to even care what other people are going through. Being ill, stressed, sleep deprived and miserable did not lead to me being the best version of myself, although I did try when I could.

Being happy, relaxed and well resourced has put me in a much better position to think about what other people might need and how best to support them. I’m calmer in face of difficulty, and I have more to give. It is generally the case that it is the people with least who give most, because suffering tends to teach us compassion and empathy. However, having very little to give means that giving a large percentage of what you have may not amount to much.

My growing suspicion is that hatred and cruelty may well often come from places of deep, unmet need. I think this may be especially true for men who have bought into patriarchy. If you aren’t supposed to admit that you have emotional needs, you have no healthy way to address them. Those basic human needs for warmth, care and affection are labelled ‘weak’ by people who go in for toxic masculinity takes. And yet, without those things, life is grim, lonely, and unfulfilling. From inside that it may be really hard to see what’s actually causing the misery.

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about the men deploying the line ‘your body, my choice.’ What a pitiful state a person must be in to want to express that. It communicates low self esteem – a person who thinks they can only get sex through force. No one could say this who felt that they were worthy of love, affection and attention. It’s indicative of an absolutely terrible inner state, being dealt with by punishing others. I make no excuses for anyone pedalling this vileness. However, this is what we need to deal with if we’re going to deconstruct patriarchal systems of oppression.

We are all products of our environments. Our genes can be turned on and off by what’s going on around us. We are thus responsible for each other through the environments we create. We are responsible for the harm we do, as well, and for the choices we make. It is worth noting that poverty, oppression and struggle does not bring out the worst in everyone. It is not suffering that turns someone into a monster. Suffering can make us less able to be actively good, but it doesn’t automatically result in hatred. I think it’s discomfort plus a little power and a large feeling of entitlement that leaves some people taking that out on anyone less powerful than themselves.

Punishment is largely a tool for oppression. Who gets to dish it out, and who receives it tends to reflect the power structures that already exist. Very little of any use comes from it. I’m a firm believer in restorative justice – people with no good options seldom make good choices.  One of my thoughts at the moment is that we need more information out there about how to have good relationships and how to experience yourself as a strong and manly man while also having your full range of emotions. Including vulnerability.

We need to create better options, so that fewer chaps are persuaded that the only option open to them is to have power over someone else’s body. There is no joy in knowing that someone does something only because you are forcing them. Men who sign up for oppression are also victims of patriarchy even as they perpetuate it. The question is, how to persuade people that systems of oppression will hurt them more than helping them. I guess it is partly about keeping on saying it so that more people are aware of it.