Nimue Brown's Blog, page 63

Self Care Strategies

(Nimue)

I recently saw a friend on Facebook mention what they were doing as part of their self care strategy and it struck me that this is a brilliant idea. So many of us struggle with looking after ourselves. If there are a lot of demands on your time and energy then it’s all too easy for your own needs to end up at the bottom of the list. I see working mums in my friends circle struggling with this especially. There are serious questions to ask about what we expect of each other and the kinds of pressures some people are under to put everyone else first.

Some years ago I worked out that while doing book promotion for other people is work I enjoy, I’m not great at doing it around my own work. I had to become deliberate about putting time for that into my working day and approaching it in a structured way. For anyone struggling with self care, a similar approach is well worth a thought. It’s worth having a strategy.

The first step is to figure out what you need, what you’re missing and what would make a real difference. Taking the time just to think about your own needs can require a radical shift of thinking if you aren’t used to it. Getting the space to explore this can mean asking the people around you – at home or at work – to carry a fairer share of the burden. Maria DeBlassie has some good things to say about the importance of workspace boundaries and not being pressured into doing more than your job should entail. Her book Everyday Enchantments https://druidlife.wordpress.com/2021/01/16/everyday-enchantments-a-review/ is full of insights into self care and well worth checking out.

What helps? What lifts your spirits and nourishes your heart? What makes you feel good about yourself and about being alive? Self care isn’t just moisturising cream and a relaxing bath. If your way of life doesn’ meet your needs then self care can take you into challenging territory. But, what are we doing with this one precious life if it isn’t joyful and satisfying? What are we here for if it doesn’t include living rich and rewarding lives? Finding out what that means for you and how to have more of it is an adventure, and requires thought and dedication.

Self care for me includes time with musicians. Shared music is a source of joy. Self care means having space for my physical self and a body with an intense array of physical needs around movement, touch, expression and interaction with the physical world. I have a brain that is perpetually hungry for input and taking care of it calls for a rich diet of fiction, nonfiction and experience. I’ve had to put in the time to understand myself and make sense of who I am in order to recognise these things, and now I’m investing in that insight to change how I live.

Self care can be a nice smelling soap and an early night, and it’s good to get those basic things in the mix. For me, a self care strategy needs to include time in the landscape and has to deal with my need for novelty and adventure. I’m looking at the shape of my weeks and trying to make sure I budget in more of the things I need, and it’s working well. 

The great irony here is that self care isn’t the enemy of productivity or usefulness. Running yourself into the ground is a surefire way of not being able to do much. At the moment I’m writing well, I’m inspired, I have energy, I’m getting good things done and am able to contribute more. Self care creates a state of bounty and means I have abundance to share – as could we all. I don’t know who humans are so focused on creating systems of misery and scarcity, but I’m determined to change that in my own life as much as I can.

Overcoming apathy and fear

Unsolvable problems are a curious human construct. There are always options. Sometimes there aren’t many options – as with chronic illness and bereavement, but there are always better ways of dealing with things. Managing a condition is far better than being in denial about it. Letting yourself grieve is better than just going numb. When dealing with anything natural, there’s always some scope for doing it well, or in the best possible way.

The kinds of situations that don’t have solutions are created by humans. Situations of abuse and torment, of control and powerlessness. It’s when humans abuse power that other humans lose their scope to do things well. Slavery, concentration camps, forced labour, human trafficking – these horrors rob people of their autonomy and their scope to act. 

The idea of powerlessness can rob us of the power to act. When we don’t believe there are answers, we don’t look for them. When we accept despair, we don’t try to improve things. If it seems like there are no options at all then falling into apathy and inaction can feel protective. However, it also takes away our scope for acting, and for finding a way out.

By nature I’m stubborn. That’s a trait I share with my female line. We tough things out, far beyond the point where that’s sensible. Only when my grandmother had a stroke did it come to light that she’d also got water on a lung, which she’d just been living with. Determination can get you through things like nothing else will. It can also keep you stuck banging your head against problems it might be better to walk away from, or get help with. As with all things, there’s a need for balance and any tool can become a liability if you aren’t careful with it.

There’s a huge practical difference between determination to survive and determination to thrive and I’m seeing a lot at the moment about how that works. Slogging away at things isn’t always the answer. Sometimes you need a radical shift, a new way of doing things or thinking about them. Not all problems can be solved by attrition. Sometimes there’s more to be had than just enduring and getting through. Finding that requires a mental shift out of survival mode and into a more expansive headspace that invites possibility.

If you’ve experienced a manufactured situation with no solutions, this can leave marks. I’ve dealt with working situations that were set up to fail, and where the asserted intention had nothing to do with the actual agenda. I’ve seen spaces where people were so intent on doing things in the way that they’d always done them that they risked becoming unworkable as the situation changed. I’ve seen leaders more interested in making people do stuff than in getting anything real done. These things can breed feelings of futility, because you can’t win no matter what you do. Some people refuse to ever be pleased or satisfied, and will not accept anything as right or good enough.

However, the reality is that ‘good enough’ must always exist, even if people you’re dealing with don’t think so. Unwinnable games are made by people, they aren’t inevitable. Sometimes all you can do with a situation is get out of it. Then follows the process of rebuilding how you think so that you can imagine solutions and right answers and become effective again.

I’ve recognised lately that a lot of my panic has its roots in historical situations where there was no way of getting anything right. So I’m asserting that I’m a competent capable person, that I can figure things out and research solutions. Usually there are answers, and ways forward, options and at least the scope for doing things with grace and compassion.

Ancestors in the landscape

Ancestors can seem like a distant, abstract sort of concept. Once you look further back than the ones you can name, there are a lot of them. There’s a lot to be said for being able to make more substantial connections with them. One good way of doing this is seeking ancestors in the landscape.

For Druids, there are three kinds of ancestors to consider – those of blood, those of place and those of tradition. No matter where you are, there will be something of ancestry of place to explore. Something as simple as a footpath represents a connection with people of the past. Old buildings, the shapes of fields, the history of hedges and woodland can all be worth finding out about. 

Ordinance survey maps are a great source of information about historical features. Going to visit a site is a great way of making a physical connections with your ancestors in the landscape. There’s nothing like standing in a place and knowing something about what it meant to people in the past – and any place where you know something of the history can give you this.

I see prehistoric ancestors as ancestors of both place and tradition. I don’t claim any direct link with the practices of ancient people, but at the same time this is where I draw a lot of my inspiration from. 

In the photo, I’m standing at the Nympsfield barrow. It’s been opened up and excavated, it isn’t what it was but that also means there’s a connection with early archaeologists. I remember first going to this barrow as a very small child, and not really understanding what I was seeing beyond the feeling that it was important. 

This is a place I’d like to spend some serious time sitting out and contemplating, which for various reasons I have not so far managed to do. I’ve spent more time inside the next barrow along the hill line, which is complete and sometimes accessible. I’ve also spent a lot of time at the next barrow in the other direction, sitting out. I find it meaningful just to put my body in these spaces and be present. It is enough for me to share space with my ancestors of place, and to know them a little through what they’ve left behind.

Practicing gratitude

(Nimue)

Being deliberate about gratitude is a really good element to add into your spiritual practice. There are many different ways of approaching it. Keeping a gratitude journal to note down the things you really appreciate each day is one strategy. You can contemplate what there is to be grateful for as part of a meditative practice. Gratitude is an excellent focus for prayer, if that suits you better. It can also be expressed well as part of rituals, be those shared or solitary.

Even when times are tough and life is grim, there are usually small beauties to celebrate. The sunset, birdsong, a really nice cloud, a breath of wind on a hot day, a smile from someone, a kind word. Practicing gratitude helps centre those experiences so that they become more of a focal point in your day. If you’re genuinely struggling, this can help you find comfort and small moments of respite.

Depression can rob you of the ability to see what’s good in your life. Making time every day to actively think about what’s good and to identify it can help push back against what depression does. If you’re trapped by historical suffering but technically safe, then gratitude can be a good way of helping yourself to recalibrate and move on.

If things are actually hellish, then it’s important not to start being grateful for awful things. I know there are some ostensibly spiritual teachers who encourage people to be grateful for all experiences, but I don’t think that’s healthy. You do not have to be grateful for the lessons that break your heart, the misery that crushes you or the harm you experience. If there’s a time for that, it’s when you’re well clear of those things and can be grateful for what you’ve learned and how far you’ve come. If things are awful, you are absolutely allowed to be cross and to resent it, and that doesn’t make you a less spiritual person. We need to embrace the full range of our experiences and sometimes things are just shit and need treating as such.

Capitalism teaches us to always want more. Gratitude teaches us to slow down and enjoy what we already have. Looking at the wealth and bounty we have helps us take more pleasure from what’s already in our lives. Gratitude increases joy and time invested in appreciating good things will enrich your life. It also calls for slowing down. This is a practice where you have to stop regularly and notice things. Appreciation invites slow relishing, pausing, and taking time. That means investing more in the things that strike you as good, and this way lies more scope for happiness and having more to be grateful for.

There are a lot of social prompts that push people towards ingratitude, being demanding, expecting more than we get and so forth. This seems to be a problem that especially afflicts people who have a great deal. Rudeness, selfishness and lack of appreciation are things that often go with having a lot of money. There’s an interesting intersection between social power and how we express ourselves here.

I have a vast amount to be grateful for at the moment, with returning health being at the top of the list. It’s hard to enjoy things when you’re ill all the time. I’ve done a lot of years focusing on small beauties and joys, and making what good out of what little was available to me. As my situation improves I’m experiencing giddy feelings of abundance, and deep joy in celebrating that. I am so utterly grateful for how my life has changed.

Leap! A Love Story

(Reviewed by Nimue)

This is an utterly lovely novel. It’s a gay romance with a main character coming to terms with grief and learning how to love again. It’s an emotional book, underpinned by warmth, compassion and humanity. The story is set on Crete, and the backdrop is the Minoan culture.

Laura is someone who has spent a lot of time exploring Minoan history and spirituality, so she’s able to write the setting from a place of deep understanding. Her understanding really enriches the story. What’s especially wonderful is that this is such a vibrant culture, distinctly different from other European cultures. At the centre of this story is the Minoan bull leaping, and the work people must have done surrounding all of this. It’s an imaginative engagement with the known history, bringing it all to life and making it relatable.

I loved the sex-positive attitude that permeates the book, and the different ways this shows up in the lives of the characters. At the same time, the story is a thoughtful exploration of what grief does to a person and what unprocessed anger does too. The main character is a hot mess, heartbroken and unable to move on. He’s got a lot of thins wrong and spends a lot of time making mistakes – in very understandable ways. what we see is the process of him re-engaging with life and working out how to open his heart again. This is a book rich with compassion and insight, it’s a warm-hearted piece of writing with much to offer. While there is a lot of grief and loss in the back story, the tale is at its core a celebration of life and love.

Beautifully done, heartily recommended.

Find out more on the author’s website – https://www.lauraperryauthor.com/leap-a-love-story

Getting things wrong

(Nimue)

We all make mistakes. To be able to learn, grow and flourish, we need the freedom to make mistakes and plenty of room to regroup and try again when things aren’t perfect. When you’re afraid of getting things wrong, it’s really limiting and I see this a lot in people who want to create, express themselves, sing, dance etc, but who are afraid of being judged or mocked for messing up. It’s not fair to expect yourself to get everything right first time. It’s really important not to crush people who are learning – and we’re all learning.

The temptation in face of a mistake is often to double down on why the other person shouldn’t have a problem. This wipes out any scope for learning and improving. It often comes from a fear of consequences. When people don’t feel safe owning their mistakes you can end up with unsafe situations and cultures of denial. This serves no one. When the collective focus is on learning from mistakes and sharing responsibility for problems, that gets a lot more done. 

The power of the individual has a huge impact here. The more power you have, the less responsibility you can be made to take. All too often, responsibility falls on the shoulders of those least able to meet it – the way some of the media in the UK blames refugees, disabled people and those in poverty for the problems in the country, and not the policies that got us here would be a case in point. Ideally, the more power you have the more responsibility you should have, but all too often it doesn’t play out that way.

It’s liberating being able to say ‘I messed that up,’. It’s good to have the room to say why. People make honest mistakes all the time, and it tends to come down to not knowing enough, and not knowing that you didn’t know. Not having the right information, tools or skills are issues. Misunderstanding can only be dealt with if you can admit it happened in the first place. You can’t know everything, and it has to be ok not to know. 

Then there are the body issues. Being tired, hungry, in pain, scared, hormonally challenged, emotionally impacted… there are lots of things happening in our bodies all the time that can trip us up, and we often don’t notice until things go wrong. Being able to admit that opens the way to being gentler, dealing with your own needs and getting things sorted out. Again there’s the power issue, because if a person is pushed to breaking point in a situation, it isn’t fair to then blame them for breaking. No one is sharp or efficient at the end of a ten hour working day.

Genuine apologies are restorative to whoever has been impacted. When problems are recognised, you validate the humanity of whoever has had things go wrong for them. Conversely, if people just have to endure things going wrong and don’t have their needs and issues acknowledged, that creates or reinforces power imbalances. It also helps to know if something wasn’t meant personally. If someone apologises for snapping at you and says they were short tempered because they were tired and that you didn’t do anything wrong, it’s easy to shrug that off and not worry about it. Otherwise what can happen is that the person on the receiving end is made responsible for what the person in a bad mood does to them, and that takes a toll if it happens a lot.

When we can admit mistakes, we can be kinder to ourselves and to each other. It’s a powerful foundation for identifying and dealing with injustice. When we avoid creating unjust situations in our daily lives, we’re better placed to understand and tackle the bigger injustices out there. Justice is very much about the culture we collectively create. Power, responsibility and blame are all part of this, and there are everyday opportunities to explore and tackle that.

Anger, justice and restoration

CW abuse

Anger can be a healing and restorative thing. It’s an emotion I’ve struggled to handle for most of my life, and I’m finally coming to see what it can do when used well, and not simply turned inwards.

Anger is protective. It’s a response to harm or to invaded boundaries that allows you to reassert your own personhood. If you aren’t in a situation where you can get angry about things that hurt and harm you, then your whole identity, humanity and self esteem will be undermined. This is an issue for people experiencing domestic abuse and workplace bullying. People who are trafficked and dealing with modern slavery are not in a position to express anger. Here in the UK, the government is criminalising actions that used to allow us to express our anger at injustice.

When you just have to shut up and put up with things, and you aren’t allowed to protect yourself, the psychological damage is huge. Added to this, is the burden that these experiences come in situations of power imbalance and genuine threat. Fear of what will happen if you express fair and appropriate anger is a crushing thing to deal with. Whether that’s poverty from the loss of work and having to accept an unreasonable workplace in order to survive, or fear of violence from a partner, if it isn’t safe to be angry you are in a really problematic situation.

If you go through a lot of this, it can take you into places of apathy and feelings of futility. There’s a terrible experiment that I ran into when studying psychology. (Trigger warning for animal cruelty in this paragraph, but I’m going to go over it quickly). Put a dog in a room and have some part of the floor give the dog electric shocks, and the dog will quickly learn where to run to and will try to escape from suffering. If there’s nowhere to go, the dog will learn to give up and will just lie there. People are much the same.

When there’s nothing you can do about what’s being done to you, then it’s all too easy to slide into a numb place and not even try to function. Often, injustice doesn’t result in people rising up in anger, it results in a protective shutting down and you learn to just lie there and take it.

Being able to feel anger can therefore be a result of being safer. It might be something you can only have after the event, if you’re fortunate enough to get out. That can be disorienting – emotions turning up long after what caused them are not easy to deal with. Anger and grief often go together, and anger is often part of a normal grief process. I suspect grief may often be part of a normal anger process and if you haven’t had the space to feel protective of yourself then when the anger comes you will also need to deal with grief over whatever has happened to you. 

There are a few things I hope people will take away from this. The first one is that we tend to judge people who don’t get out – especially from domestic abuse situations. It can seem from the outside that the victim is fine with what’s happening to them, invites it, likes it, wants it, gets something out of being a victim. Not feeling safe expressing anger will make you passive, it’s not consent or wanting to be in a situation, it’s being overwhelmed with powerlessness. Understanding this process helps to counter victim blaming.

The second takeaway is that anger isn’t necessarily a problem – your own or other people’s. It can be an important part of healing, because it’s what allows a person to re-establish their own sense of self and their boundaries. Supportive listening can be a good response to this. Acknowledging harm caused and injustice experienced is something we can all do to support people who need to be angry. Anger doesn’t have to be destructive, in fact when handled this way it can be a healing and restorative thing.

Midsummer at the margins

Ragwort in profusion at the margins, yellowy cheer

Heralds the coming of the stripy caterpillars

Whose presence brings joy to my childish heart.

I will seek them out, gleeful, hopeful.

In time they turn from tiny grains of life

To fat expanses of fleshy potential and thence

To their moth form, red and black, dayflying confections.

I will watch their stages, growth and transformation.

St Johnswort honey yellow companion at the edges,

Growing weed cheerful with valerian and bramble

This rush of summer, this outpouring of life

Unpromising ground transformed in plant magic

To green and gold, to flower and fruit, exuberant

With solstice bounty, the high energy of the sun.

One lone orchid, vibrant in the grass, this urban

Renegade this refusal of human sterility, bright 

Reminder of the multihued hordes on higher ground

Wildness is seldom solitary, not by nature

One good foxglove demands another, another

Profusion is the season’s flavour and delight.

There should be countless bees, grasshoppers.

Along the road I hear the silence of the land beneath

The hum of cars, I hear the absence where once

There must have been bird song, I see the barren

State of human creations and I love the pioneers

Trying with all their might to reclaim this space.

My heart hungers for beauty, and I too find myself

Out at the edges on the side of the road,

Clinging to what life there is, to the determined

Presence of wildness, in gasps and whispers

Longing for the songbirds who are not here

And the sweet profusion of remembered butterflies

I am afraid I shall not see again in this life.

Today, the worts, and the blackberry flowers.

Today the beautiful demoiselle flies, glinting

Jewels above the stream. Mourning absence

Celebrating life.

Healing

It’s been an unexpected few months in terms of what’s shifted in my physical health. Things that had become normal to me turn out not to be intrinsic. I’ve had sore, scabby patches of skin on my scalp for years, and now… I don’t. I’ve had relentless ulcers in my mouth and throat for years, and now those have cleared up. After some years not being able to heal cuts and skin damage easily, I’ve got a body that is repairing itself. I haven’t had heart palpitations in a couple of months and those had become frequent and horrible and had everything to do with low blood pressure, which is also sorting out now. I’ve had very little insomnia, very little panic, and when there have been distress issues, they’ve been easily dealt with – even when that included a round of serious triggering and invasive thoughts.

Much of this comes down to stress, evidently. The way stress had been impacting on my ability to sleep was clearly a major factor. Sleep is important for healing. Immune systems take a lot of energy to run, and stress is also expensive on a system, so that’s probably part of it. I have the kind of gut that responds to stress by failing to function, so being less stressed means better nutritional uptake which means more resources to support wellness.

I’ve experienced huge shifts in my energy and concentration – more sleep and better nutrition are clearly helping there. That in turn has also lifted my spirits because I’m able to do more. I can get out and walk, and be in the landscape, which in turn improves my bodily health. I’ve had the concentration to be able to work more effectively, which means I’m happier and more enthused about how I spend my time. These things have greatly improved my quality of life.

There isn’t a condition out there that isn’t made worse by stress. I’ve felt for a long time that it’s not something we collectively take anything like seriously enough around impacts on health. Stress definitely isn’t just a mental health issue, as recent experiences have really brought home to me. Minds and bodies are all part of the same system, and our stress responses are physical processes happening in our bodies. Continual stress will make you very sick indeed.

At the moment I’m experiencing a lot of virtue cycles. The progress I make opens up the way to further improvements and more options for investing in my health and wellbeing. I’ve got a lot of work to do rebuilding physical strength and stamina. I have work to do around being more able to perform and play. I have things to learn still about managing the flows of my energy, how to rest effectively and how to pace. There’s always that temptation to run flat out whenever that seems possible, and it’s easy to get into the bodily equivalent of boom and bust cycles that way. I want to function more consistently. 

I’ve learned a lot in all of this about the interplay between emotions and body health. Emotions are chemical processes, and for a long time I’ve struggled with producing any of the feel-good body chemistry. Again, being able to digest food and be more active is contributing to better body chemistry, and I’m able to feel a lot more than I could. This time last year I was mostly numb and hollow feeling, with no idea how to keep going. At this point, joy is part of my daily life, I wake up feeling hopeful and I am experiencing feelings of being pleased with what I do, and being able to enjoy things. 

What’s been most powerful for me in all of this is discovering that I’m not broken beyond repair, and not intrinsically a miserable person. It turns out that given the right situation, I can heal and I can thrive.

Crimson Coven

I’ve been part of The Crimson Coven for a while now, and wanted to do a shout-out for this, and for Halo Quin who holds the space.

I’ve previously reviewed Halo’s book on Crimson Craft, which is very much linked to the Coven. This work is all about celebrating sacred sexuality, beauty, pleasure, love, joy and passion, and how all of that relates to creativity and magic and our everyday lives. It’s all focused on the solitary practitioner, so it’s really uncomplicated and the group is very much about mutual support. It’s a very gentle space. I’ve found this to be a wonderful way of exploring embodied Paganism and it’s been a meaningful part of my own healing work of late.

You can find out more about The Crimson Coven on Halo’s website – https://haloquin.net/crimson-coven/

There are online rituals which I’ve found surprisingly effective. Halo is an excellent ritual leader and holds space really well. This is the only group I’ve explored online ritual with because it wasn’t something I had previously thought would work for me. If you’re inclined towards meditative ritual spaces, this works really well. If you want to get some sense of this, check out Halo’s other videos for an idea of how she handles things. https://www.youtube.com/@haloquin

The facebook group includes daily prompts for sharing and contemplation – we talk regularly about what we’re celebrating, what we’re working on, what we’re doing in terms of self care – it’s all very accessible and easy to get involved with. No prior witchcraft experience is needed. If you’re on Facebook, you can join over here – https://www.facebook.com/groups/546845370250416

Sensuality and sexuality can be challenging subjects, and so many people experience wounding in that aspect of their lives. It’s good to have gentle safe space for mutual support. I’ve found this group empowering and uplifting, and it’s been really helpful to me.