Nimue Brown's Blog, page 299

Meditation and mental health issues

It’s widely suggested that the more extreme end of mental health problems and meditation are not a good mix. For those who suffer delusions, and struggle with consensus reality, any journey into the mind is potentially fraught with danger. It’s very easy to imagine this is an issue for other people, for people somehow set aside by things that make ‘them’ separate from ‘us’. This is not so.

The way a brain functions is influenced by its environment and the way in which it is used, as well as all the hardware issues. Any brain can become dysfunctional – obsessive thinking, and narcissism are wholly available to all of us. Any of us can court delusion, and can render ourselves dysfunctional. Used the wrong way, mediation can be a very problematic thing indeed.

I’ve done whole meditation days, and as an occasional thing they are wonderful, but I also had a friend who took up meditating full time and destroyed his life and mind in the process. Whether the meditation was a cause or a symptom it’s hard to say, but either way it needed taking seriously.

We can use meditation to build and reinforce a sense of being special, spiritual, superior, and this can help lead us astray. If we are creating pathworkings and visualisations, it’s important to keep an eye on what ideas we are reinforcing, what we tell ourselves about the kind of people we are and the sort of world we inhabit. This is by no means easy, and a mind that is unwell is least equipped to see how an apparently spiritual course of action might be turning into something damaging. It is easy (I speak from experience here) to use meditation time to reinforce fears, obsessions, and to keep running round the very loops we need to avoid.

There are no easy answers to avoiding this. Checking in with other people can help, as can watching out for situations where you’re being asked to validate an experience that might not be a good thing to validate. If you think someone else is hurting themselves with meditation, an aggressive challenge is not the answer, that much is clear.

Meditation should be about calming the mind, opening to inspiration and insight, self knowledge, creativity, relaxation and delight. However, much the same can be said of cake and ice-cream, and if you go overboard with those you can ruin your bodily health. Balance is key, and knowing that the risks are available to anyone may help.

Lessons from 2016

I’m a big fan of pausing now and then to review my experiences so that I can see what there is to be learned. The end of a calendar year is a very obvious point at which to do this. Normally I review things on a day to day basis, but some patterns and lessons only really emerge when a bigger time frame is considered.

2016 delivered a run of intensive lessons about how I value myself, and how I act based on that value. For too long, I’ve been over-grateful for any kind of place to be involved, any sense of being wanted, or useful, or tolerated. In practice this has made me vulnerable to people who want to use me, and has put me in places that don’t give me what I need. At a less unpleasant level, it has also put me in places of half-heartedness and lack of commitment, and those don’t suit me either.

What I need, above and beyond all else in terms of work and community is the emphatic ‘Yes’. I need the people who are wholehearted about wanting me in the mix and who will accept my wholehearted and serious commitment. Situations that want me half-hearted, not too intense, and so on, crush me over time. I have realised that if I assume nothing better is available, then I won’t be looking for anything better. This year I started looking for the social spaces that give me an emphatic yes. I’d come to think of my marriage as a little bubble of difference, a unique space that I couldn’t hope to replicate in terms of the feeling of being valued, accepted and inspired. It’s not just us, I just needed to learn how to look, and to believe it was worth looking.

For a couple of years now, working at Moon Books part time has been an absolute joy, because that’s a space where my energy, ideas, innovation and efforts are valued and trusted. I love that work, and it has become the measure for other things I take on with other people (measuring everyone against Tom would seem unfair). If it’s not as good as Moon Books, if I’m not as excited about it, if I’m not working with people who are that fired up… why would I bother?

What I’ve found is that spaces, and people are becoming more available to me. I want to do the work that only I can do. I want to do work that is needed and valued. I want to spend my spare time with people who are delighted to do that, not with people who grudgingly accommodate and find me difficult. 2016 has taught me that I can have those things, and I don’t need to waste any more of my time on half-hearted nonsense.

Evergreens in winter

This time of year is the best for spotting evergreen trees in predominantly deciduous landscapes. With the majority of trees losing their leaves, the vibrant colours of holly and ivy really shine through in a woodland. Ivy can dominate a tree such that it looks like it has its own leaves – in extreme cases, mistletoe can do the same, so it’s always worth getting in for a closer look if you can.

There are also evergreen oaks – the holm oak (see above), which in the greener part of the year you won’t see unless you’re really looking for them. In winter they really stand out.

holm oak leave.

More holm oak information here – https://www.woodlandtrust.org.uk/visiting-woods/trees-woods-and-wildlife/british-trees/common-non-native-trees/holm-oak/

Images in this blog borrowed from the Woodland Trust website.

That New Year thing

An arbitrary date change is as good a reason as any to pause, look back and look forward. Since giving up the aspects of self-abuse and flagellation (lose weight no longer features on my list) I’ve come to rather enjoy the process of setting intentions and checking in at the end of the year to see how I did. The blog is decidedly helpful in this regard.

Last year’s resolutions were all met. I read more books, I sold a lot of books, and I did a far better job of picking my fights and not investing energy where it would clearly do no good. Last year I also resolved to go to the pub more, have more live performance in my life, and dance more, and these have been the areas of wildest success.

This summer I discovered Dawn Morgan’s 5 Rhythms classes, which are fantastic. I’ve gone once a month, ish, and my confidence, balance and joy in dancing have improved greatly. I’ve danced more at home as a consequence.

Stroud Out Loud (a monthly spoken word based gathering) became my opening gambit for ‘more live stuff’ and is a brilliant event, and has since spawned an occasional singing session that goes to the pub. This year has seen a fantastic upswing in my social life – improved energy levels and really feeling that I’ve found my tribe now. I’ve got people to do things with.

I intend to keep going with all of the things on last year’s list. So, here’s the stretch-goal list for 2017

Improve my stamina so that 2 hours of fun stuff (walking, dancing) does not challenge me at all.
Remove the mute button, and be as I am with more people more of the time.
Ceilidh
Write songs. Even if I only sing them twice in public, before I go off them, I want to do more of this.
Cause more fun stuff to happen.
Pick up some new skills (maybe craft skills, I don’t know, we’ll see what comes along).

 

Despite the international politics, despite the many environmental issues that worry me greatly, despite the many good and beautiful people who died in 2016, it was a good year for me overall. All years have their share of pain and challenges in them, that’s a given. And despite all the bigger picture issues, I feel optimistic about next year. 2016 saw a lot of changes, I think I grew and healed a considerable amount and I feel ready to move forward towards better things. More books. Lovely people. More walking and dancing and singing and going to the pub.

Grooming the human mammal

Mammals groom. As I type this, I’m sat next to a cat who is busily washing herself, with her tongue. For most mammals, washing means licking. For any non-solitary creature, grooming is also a collective activity with a community bonding aspect to it. I wonder when it was that humans stopped licking themselves, and each other. Clothes clearly have an influence. To lick a fellow human these days could only be understood as a sexual act, and certainly none of us would be likely to think of it as hygiene.

The grooming of fellow humans is also something we no longer do as a natural part of daily life. Parent humans apply water, cleaning products and brushes to offspring, until said offspring can do it for themselves. Those who cannot clean themselves are groomed by others, but this is often the kind of work we pay people to do in the context of care homes. We don’t mind paying for grooming, for haircuts and washes, for the treatments of beauty parlour and spa – if we can afford it, that is.

It’s interesting to speculate what human relationships would be like if we routinely groomed each other, with no sexual connotation, and no financial aspect. We know from other mammals, that connections are reinforced by this. I’m prepared to bet, based on how modern humans respond to hairdressers and spa days, that there are some considerable feel good factors attached to being groomed. In monkeys, grooming can also be part of the expression and reinforcement of social hierarchy, which is complicated for a creature like me, but I think it’s likely a better way of handling it than many of the alternatives. It certainly users fewer resources.

I think this is all part and parcel of the way we’ve tended to sexualise all forms of contact. We tend to see touch as sexual, and thus only accept it in the context of certain kinds of relationship – sexual, familial or paid for. The word ‘grooming’ is increasingly used to suggest preparing someone for inappropriate sexual contact. There are comforts we aren’t allowed to provide for each other, but are fine if you stump up the cash. Other ways of being are clearly possible.

Beauty is as beauty does

While I can and do appreciate the many forms in which physical human beauty can manifest, I’ve never found it terribly persuasive. A beautiful image has undeniable charm, and I’ll cheerfully look, but I’ve never acted on the power of visual beauty alone. I’m more interested in what a person does, who they are, how they are. The apparently beautiful face looks very different when sneering, or delivering a vicious putdown.

I’ve noticed over and over again how my sense of the beauty of a person comes far more from who they are than any pattern of physical characteristics. Generosity, humour, creativity, passion, honour, courage, integrity, intensity, compassion… these things cause people to be beautiful. If I see greed, cruelty, mean spiritedness, one upmanship, jealousy, and the like, there can be no real beauty in that face. Of course in practise we’re all complex mixes of feelings and we all run a broad spectrum and what matters is where a person spends most of their time.

I fell in love with Tom before I met him. I fell in love with him without hearing his voice, or having any idea what, if anything, the body chemistry would be like. On the day of posting this, we have been married 6 years, and I expect us to be together for life. I fell in love with his ideas, his art, his creativity and the person I came to know through emails. He fell in love with my writing first. I trust this more than I trust the appeal of a face, or a nice bum.

One of the problems with bodies is that they change. We tend to get older, we wrinkle, sag, blemish, illness and accident can change us dramatically. I’d rather wake up next to a person who is full of love, kindness and a desire to co-operate than the most perfectly toned abdomen in the world, if it’s attached to someone unkind. I’d rather the face into which time has carved laughter lines, or marked with grief, than a face augmented to show nothing at all.

If I love who someone is, and how they are, and what they do, then I will love the physical form they take. I will love the details of them – warts and all, in delight and acceptance. Equally, if I find someone unpleasant, no amount of the visual aspect will impact on me at all.

Bardic Magic – collaboration

There are a number of aspects to bardic magic, but I think inspiration and the flow of it in a creative context lies at the heart of the experience. If you’ve set out to walk the bard path, creativity obviously speaks to you already, but how does a person take that up a level?

Working with other people offers some options. For me, just being around people whose work I find exciting and inspiring can have a huge effect. Being in a space where other people are being creative – be that a workshop or something less formal – can be an encouragement to create. Having people to share your own creativity with can be an incentive to get busy.

Doing creative things with people is really interesting stuff. I’m going to write about singing just to give it a focus, but from experience anything you can do collectively will create similar possibilities, although I think collective singing has a particular magic of its own.

There’s an intimacy, and a sense of involvement when you put voices together – as true for chanting protest slogans as it is for songs. There’s a real sense of being together. Any participation will give you that if you are open to it.

When people are skilled and experienced, they can fall into singing together really easily – improvising together, playing with the playing. This can be possible just from a depth of musical experience. It can be a powerful and moving experience to share with people in this way.

However, sometimes, for reasons that defy explanations, something amazing happens. It’s not always about the quality of music produced – although often the results are beyond what could have been expected. People sing together, and something emerges that is more than the sum of its parts. For me, it’s a sense that the music is coming from somewhere else, as though between them, the people involved have opened a doorway into magic. A sense of enchantment enters the song. It’s hard to put into words what is, for me, a deeply numinous experience.

When music becomes magic, it’s a soul nourishing, heart lifting sort of thing. I’ve been blessed, in my past, with two long term musical collaborations that reliably had this effect, and I’ve sung and played with a few other people where magic showed up.

So, how to do it? It’s not the sort of thing that can be reached by any kind of mechanical process, but it is about having your heart open, and being willing to be open to the people or person you are singing with. Willing to bare your soul, and give everything of yourself, and open to their baring of soul, their complete giving.

Making new traditions

For me, one of the great joys of modern Paganism is the scope we have to create new traditions. Not, I hope, with an eye to becoming the dogma for future generations, but in a playful and light-hearted way that enables us to let go of anything that doesn’t work.

We have a wealth of inspiration to draw on from folklore and mythology, but we don’t have to be excessively faithful to it. You don’t have to spend long studying these things to realise that they change over time anyway. Traditions are all about people keeping the bits they like, letting go of the bits they don’t and innovating new things to suit the time and place in which they find themselves.

Midwinter is the season of festivals, and there are a great many we might look at. Or, we can make our own. For me, one of the key seasonal features is the Christmas pudding. This is largely because of all the festive foodstuffs, it’s the one I truly love. I’ve been making puddings for years, and where I can, I make puddings to share. Having a pudding tribe is an important part of the season for me. One of my other personal traditions is visiting the swans – I live near Slimbridge, where migrant swans come in each winter to feed. They travel thousands of miles escaping the arctic winter for the relative mildness of the UK. There are also huge duck migrations, and I’ll enjoy seeing them, too.

Traditions give us fixed points in the year, they can connect us to ancestors, landscape, other living things, communities… they are very much what we make of them. Too much tradition is inevitably stifling, but sprinkled through a year, traditions form points of familiarity and continuity that can help us feel secure and give us a sense of place in both time and the physical world.

Anyone can start a tradition, and keep it for as long as they wish. As Pagans, we can, and I think should craft our traditions based on our experiences and needs, knowing what we want and need from them and acting accordingly. If we’re going to invest in keeping on doing something every year, it should be something that feeds the soul, lifts us, helps us bond with each other and brings joy, comfort, coherence, and connection.

Evolving traditions

If something is traditional, that shouldn’t mean it’s above questioning, even if you are someone who is passionate about upholding the traditions of your culture and protecting other people’s rights to their traditions.

Many cultures have a tradition of genital mutilation. Traditions of cruel punishments, unreasonable intolerance and sick leisure activities have existed all over the world through history. As someone with a deep attachment to British traditions, I am not obliged to take onboard the whole lot of them. For me, any ‘tradition’ that involves cruelty needs ditching. Baiting animals, cock fighting, bear dancing and fox hunting are all things that have been considered great traditions in this country. To try and hide that cruelty behind the excuse of tradition is intolerable to me.

Traditions can and do change. Mumming used to be more about collecting money for those in poverty during the winter – many customs have an aspect of ritualised begging to them – wasailing, pace egging, guy making to name but a few. Our trajectory away from abject poverty has reduced the impetus to go out undertaking these forms of ritualised begging. Instead, people now do them for fun. The traditions have changed.

The most ardent traditionalists from all cultures pick which traditions to ignore and which to uphold. Most usually people ignore the traditions they find inconvenient and uphold the ones they enjoy. Take for example the way in which the Christian far right in America is keen to uphold anything negative the Bible might suggest about LGBT people, but seems to have entirely failed to notice how opposed Christian traditions are to divorce and adultery.

The idea that ‘this is my culture and you have no right to tell me I can’t do my traditional but horrible thing’ has hard wired into it a complete disregard for how traditions actually work. Traditions change. They evolve to meet other changes in circumstances. If the wider culture changes, it is reasonable to assume the tradition will evolve to keep up. Cock fighting is no longer a sport. It’s been widely speculated that the great tradition of cheese rolling has its roots in some ancient practice involving burning wheels and human sacrifices. I have no idea if it did, but the principle that you can go from chasing a burning wheel with a human sacrifice in it down a steep slope, to chasing a cheese, is a good one. Willing victims offer sacrifices of broken bones.

If a tradition is no longer suitable, it can be changed, without destroying the culture it came from. I suggest that hanging onto an otherwise dead and unsuitable tradition, for the sake of tradition, is a sure fire way of actually killing tradition within your culture, what isn’t allowed to evolve, will die.

Father Christmas and the Pagan Child

Becoming a parent, back in 2002, the issue of what to do with Christmas soon raised its head for me. Of course for the first couple of rounds the lad was too young to have any clue. He grew up without a television so I largely got away with it until he was about three, and then of course other people started asking him what Father Christmas would be bringing. I left wrapped gifts by his bed that year, he was confused about them, but the joy of unwrapping soon wiped that away.

By the time he was four, I was really uneasy. I didn’t want to lie to him about the existence of a mythic figure who would come down the chimney and leave gifts. I wanted to be able to talk to him about myth and magic, wonder and possibility in a way that would open up his world, and enable him to trust me.

I think it was the year that the boy was 5, that we debunked Father Christmas. His school were collecting for children who had little or nothing, and I watched his growing concern and distress. As a bright lad with a tendency to think about things, he was starting to notice that the magical spirit of Christmas always gave the most to the richest children and seemed happy to leave starving children to starve, and deprived children with little or nothing. He had a sense of fair play from early on, and the wisdom to know this wasn’t it. When I sat him down and explained, he was relieved.

I remember the same year another mother on the playground saying that her son had announced he couldn’t possibly be happy at Christmas unless Father Christmas brought him a gold Dalek. They cost about fifty pounds, and she couldn’t afford it. Where do you even start?

I like the idea of a spirit of generosity at Christmas. However, the idea of Santa rewarding the good children leads to the reinforcing of the idea that money and goodness are one and the same thing. The good children all have rich parents. Poor children will get a very different experience of Christmas, and the super expensive must have, highly advertised Christmas toys are not available to them.

Bring back Krampus!