Nimue Brown's Blog, page 97

How long should you meditate?

One of the ideas that makes me genuinely angry is the suggestion that if you don’t feel like you can meditate for half an hour a day, you should meditate for an hour. It’s a heartless dismissal of the many different kinds of challenges people face both with meditating and with pressures on their time. I suspect that it doesn’t encourage people to meditate at all and that it might well be driving people away from even trying.

You do not have to meditate every day.

You do not have to meditate in a regular way or at fixed times.

There is no right amount of meditation that you have to do.

Meditation shouldn’t be intrinsically stressful nor should it be something that adds to your burden. If it’s just another duty on the list of things you have to get done today, it’s probably not doing you much good at all. First and foremost, meditation is something to do because you get some kind of benefit from it and not because the meditation police have made you feel uncomfortable.

Slowing down is good. Resting is good. Taking time just to breathe, to think, to stop and look around, is good. Contemplation is good. Taking a meditative approach to the thing you had to do anyway, can also be good. 

Meditation can mean spending five minutes trying to consciously unclench your jaw muscles. It can mean gazing peacefully out of the window as you contemplate the changing sky. You can get a lot done with a few minutes of deliberately calm breathing. 

I can heartily recommend just stopping for a few minutes to check in with yourself every so often. How are you feeling? How is your body doing? Is there anything that you need? Take some slow breaths, drink something, let your muscles relax a bit. Give yourself time to process what’s going on. Be kind to yourself. Making small spaces to draw breath and be present to your own experiences can open up room for more involved meditation. But it might not. Your life might not allow you an hour of pathworking at the moment. 

Making the best of things while being kind to yourself and not beating yourself up for what’s beyond you, is of itself, a very good approach to bringing meditation into your life. If you don’t have time to meditate for half an hour every day, then meditate for ten minutes, or whatever you’ve got. Make it part of your shower, or take a moment in your lunch break to just stand outside and breathe. It’s ok to do less. In fact, learning to do less will probably help you far more than making unreasonable demands of yourself ever could.

Everyone can?

I’m here to support anyone doing a thing that works for them. It’s always great seeing people winning. However, there’s a world of difference between something that’s good, or feasible for one person and the idea that everyone can do it or that everyone would benefit from it. There’s often an unconscious element of ableism to saying that everyone could, or should do a thing.

I touched on this recently around veganism. I have friends who only have a handful of things their bodies can accept as foodstuffs. Health problems, allergies, cancers of the digestive system, Crohns, IBS, injury leading to loss of gut sections… there are many things that can compromise a person’s ability to eat food. Making people feel bad about eating the few things they can actually eat doesn’t seem like a good and ethical choice to me. Many people do well on a vegan diet. Not everyone.

This shows up in a spiritual context far too often. Yoga doesn’t work for everyone – it’s a really bad idea for anyone who is hypermobile. Meditation doesn’t work for everyone – not everyone’s brains work the same way, and for the person dealing with constant pain, greater bodily awareness isn’t a good idea. Not everyone can visualise – because not everyone can see and not everyone is capable of visual imagination even if they can see. 

It doesn’t matter how beneficial a thing can be, there will always be someone it doesn’t work for. You can count on there being people who could not do the thing in question even if they really wanted to. Treating those people like they don’t exist isn’t ok. Talking about anything we might do in a way that humiliates people who cannot possibly do it, isn’t ok. All too often the ‘everyone should’ content comes with a side order of blaming people for things they can’t do, and encouraging feelings of shame. This comes up a lot around the diet industry.

Stopping saying ‘everyone’ is a very small shift that allows a lot of inclusion. It doesn’t take much thought or effort to stop asserting that everyone can do a thing, and replacing it with ‘many people would benefit from’ or similar. It’s not even that much work to think about who might not benefit from the thing you are so very invested in. Many of us are in a position to do better with this.

Chicken Sacrifices

CW food issues, blood, suicide

I’m not sure how long I’ve been struggling with anaemia, but it may be fair to assume that it started long before I noticed it. My hypermobile body always gets tired easily, so noticing an extra thing contributing to that tiredness wasn’t easy. 

I bleed hard. I always did, even when on the pill. Now, while being messed about by being peri-menopausal, I bleed hard and irregularly. In March that meant three periods in six weeks, two of which were very heavy. That’s when I became aware that anaemia was a problem for me. I was very ill, and for months after even when I wasn’t being very ill, I was struggling to function because of how exhausted I felt.

I’ve been vegetarian for years, trying to push into being vegan. In theory, I should be able to get all the iron I need from leafy greens and kidney beans and whatnot. In practice, I can’t. I take supplements, but this year those just haven’t been enough. There’s a limit on how much iron you can safely ingest this way without putting problematic amounts of pressure on your liver. And it turns out that not all iron is created equally, and that plant iron is hard to absorb compared to the iron we get from meat. One of the consequences of the hypermobility, is that it impacts on my digestive system. My ability to digest food is not what it could be – especially when I’m bleeding.

I made the decision to put meat back in my diet, once a week. Since doing that, I’ve started to recover and I’ve now weathered two periods without being massively ill. Mostly that’s been a win, but the guilt is huge. At one point, when I was in a really bad place with my mental health, I ended up sobbing my heart out over a bowl of chicken soup because it felt so unreasonable to me that chickens were being killed for me. It didn’t help that I’d recently been sent a review book that had a lot to say about how awful you are if you aren’t a vegan and how anyone can be vegan easily and those who aren’t, are not trying hard enough. I tried so hard, and the cost of doing it is high for me, and I don’t want to end up in hospital or having heart failure.

I struggle a lot with suicidal thoughts at the best of times. Going through the anaemia, I have wondered repeatedly if it would be better and more responsible to let it kill me than to take iron from another creature. It’s not a state of mind I would wish on anyone else, but I’m not always confident that keeping me alive and healthy is worth some other being dying for, and that’s not a great place to be.

I’m sharing this in the hopes that it will help people be kinder to each other around issues of diet and choice. I’m in a difficult, painful situation with no easy ways out, and a solution that saves me from high levels of pain, exhaustion and panic, as well as making it more likely that I can stay alive. 

Not everyone has a gut that works well. Not everyone can easily absorb iron from plants. Some of us need a lot more iron than others. I’m actively in favour of everyone reducing their dependence on animal products, on reducing the misery food animals are subject to, and in reducing the environmental impact of the farming industry. But I’d also like to feel ok about trying to stay alive.

Bardcraft – covering songs

While writing your own songs is always going to be an attractive choice for a bard, there’s also a lot to be said for singing other people’s material. It’s easier to learn existing songs than to write them. Engaging with existing songs roots you in your tradition and honours your ancestors of musical tradition. Keeping a song alive is a meaningful thing to do and can also be part of keeping culture and tradition alive.

As songwriters, most of us have habits. Few are the performers who can do a whole set of their own material without it starting to sound a bit samey. Throwing in some well chosen covers can help considerably with keeping your own material sounding fresh and interesting.

Covering a song well isn’t straightforward. You need to find a balance between making it your own, and being faithful to the original. You have to work out which aspects of the song are essential to its character, and which you can afford to do without. Traditional British songs tend to be fine if you just take the tune and words – often there are variants of those already in existence. Other cultures have traditional music where the harmonies are intrinsic and you can’t pull a single tune out and have it still work. Contemporary music from numerous genres can depend on the interplay between tune and accompaniment. 

I find it helps to listen to multiple versions of a song before I start trying to find my own way of doing it. With more famous songs, it’s usually possible to find cover versions, which help me explore possible ways of interpreting the music. When the song isn’t so well known, you might be able to find live versions from the songwriter, and these also help. It can also be helpful to find versions recorded much later – James doing ‘Sit Down’ at their final live concert defined my approach to covering the song.

There’s much more to working with existing material than just ‘doing a cover’ implies. As a bard, you’re going to be looking for a deeper relationship with the piece. You have to know it at a level that allows you to bring it to life, and to perform it with sincerity and a sense of meaning. It pays to take time forming a relationship with a song and letting it become part of your life, and part of you, before you try and take it out into the world.

Heat and life

This last week or so has taught me a great deal about heat. Some of it through first hand experience, some of it through reading. As the climate crisis impacts on us, I am clearly going to need a better understanding of how to survive in hotter temperatures.

My home is not designed for hot weather. I assume these flats were built with single occupancy in mind, but many of them now house families, and we’re not unusual in having three of us. Most of the advice for staying cool assumes you have resources and aren’t overcrowded. Human bodies put out heat and moisture, and if there are too many of you for the space, then keeping out the heat by closing the windows doesn’t really work.

We managed during the hottest days, by changing when we slept and when we work. Many people don’t have that option. Capitalist industrial work habits aren’t adaptable, and being able to adapt is going to be key to health and survival. While the focus is on profit it will be hard for front line workers to be gentle with themselves. Bake or starve are not reasonable options to have. To change this, we’d have to value human life and wellbeing more than we value making profits for the few.

It turns out that hot nights are a far bigger problem than hot days. My body can tolerate heat if there’s a chance to cool down overnight. When the night is also hot, sleeplessness and panic ensue, and these also undermine health. It’s not just me. Heat is much more likely to kill when it continues through the night.

One of the contributing issues here is the way in which urban spaces retain heat. Hot tarmac and hot buildings stay hot after sunset and it takes time for that heat to dissipate. To combat night heat, we need more green spaces. Tarmac that has been shaded doesn’t have heat to emit at night. Trees help us stay cooler in the day and that benefit extends into the night as well.

The obvious solutions – electric fans and air conditioning – increase our energy consumption and add to the problems we’re already experiencing. One of the things a heatwave can do is knock out the power supply, so an electric fan might not be a good investment for dealing with extreme heat at night. I’m exploring other options.

My takeaway from this is to keep a closer eye on the anticipated night temperatures during heatwaves, and to prioritise night strategies when hazardously hot nights are predicted. Finding ways to cool down is essential, but unless we deal with the climate crises, this is just firefighting and we can’t solve anything that way.

Gender and abuse

One of the things that really worries me around gender critical/ terf discourse is how they are handling ideas around violence and abuse. What I see from them increasingly is the idea that trans women are a threat to cis women because trans women are men and men are abusive. The only reason they can imagine for trans women existing seems to be that it enables men to access female spaces to abuse women. Let me be clear now that as far as I am concerned, trans women are women and that point requires no further discussion.

Problem number one – female only spaces do not protect women from abuse, and we know this because female only spaces exist but lots of women experience abuse and typically three women a week in the UK die as a consequence of it. Men who are unequivocally presenting as men do not struggle to find opportunities for abuse.

Problem number two is that not all men are abusive. Most men aren’t actively abusive although men who are not abusers often don’t do enough to counter toxic masculinity and rape culture and can benefit from it. Talking about abuse as though it’s just what men do functions to normalise it, which in turn makes it harder to tackle. Abuse isn’t inevitable. Men are not intrinsically predators and women are not inherently prey. We need to hold men accountable, not assume that they can’t help themselves.

Treating abuse by men as inevitable leads to victim blaming and puts unreasonable pressure on women to act protectively. This in turn can have the effect of driving women into women only spaces, hived off from anywhere they might have influence or significance. As a female-presenting person, I don’t want to be hived off in special, women’s only spaces where I can be more easily ignored.

Problem number three is that some women are abusive, and treating abuse like it’s always a gender issue is totally unhelpful and misleading. Women are disproportionately affected by abuse and far less likely to kill, but women can also be abusers and we should not pretend otherwise.

Problem number four exists around the determination to call pregnant people ‘women’. Not all pregnant people are women, and this is especially a problem when the pregnant person is a child, and therefore an abuse victim. Equating pregnancy to womanhood is a tactic being used to distort thinking around abortion in America at the moment. A pregnant child is a pregnant person, and is not a woman. 

When we double down on the ‘rules’ for gender identity, we are more likely to limit women than support the majority of people who identify as female. This usually impacts hardest on women of colour, who tend not to match the definitions of femininity that come from white women. Any attempt at measuring and defining women is going to exclude people, and many of these will be people who have spent their whole lives considering themselves to be female. Attempts to limit and define women invariably play into the hands of people who want to control and regulate female bodies.

The high cost of lying

There are times when lies are the wisest and most compassionate choices. If Hitler is at the door and Anne Frank is in the attic, lying is the honourable choice. However, the human mind is a delicate thing and there are consequences to constantly distorting your relationship with reality.

It is more normal to talk about this in terms of the victims – people who have been gaslit, brainwashed, mislead and otherwise compromised by untruth. These kinds of experiences can leave a person not knowing who or what to trust, including no longer being confident in their own judgement. Gaslighting is designed to damage a person in ways that make them easier to control.

But what happens to the person doing the gaslighting? What happens to the person who has to keep asserting that x is really y and that z never happened? It doesn’t really spare them from having to acknowledge what they did or what really happened, at least not inside their own minds. It doesn’t liberate them from consequences, but it does tie them to an ongoing process of not being able to deal with anything. What happens to a person when they spend their time pretending that fake things are true, and/or that true things are fake?

What happens to the Emperor when people notice that he’s naked and that his story is a lie? 

UK politics is a mess at the moment. We’re watching people who have spent years lying, trying to explain how they’re going to fix the problems they helped cause, while not admitting they helped cause the problems. Not that any of them are proposing any actual solutions. The sounds coming out of the government are peculiar and nonsensical. I find myself wondering what it must be like to have spent the last few years lying about how great Brexit is for everyone, how great a job your party is doing of handling the pandemic, and what a fine, upstanding chap your leader is. I would think that could take a toll on anyone’s mental health, and I cannot help but wonder if we’re seeing the consequences.

Pagan Portals Aos Sidhe – a review

Morgan Daimler’s Pagan Portal Aos Sidhe is a small but substantial introduction to Irish fairy folklore and myth. Morgan’s knowledge in this area is immense, and this has enabled them to get a great deal of valuable detail into a small space in a highly readable way.

Folklore is a complicated issue, because it changes over time, and people ‘contribute’ to it by making stuff up. Where the people bringing in new content are deeply immersed in the existing traditions, I don’t think this is much of a problem, it’s just the folk process. Where people come in from outside of a tradition, misunderstand it, misrepresent it and make up bits that suit them that they then pass off as traditional… that causes all kinds of problems. Irish fairy lore seems especially prone to this treatment, and this has been happening since the nineteenth century.

Morgan highlights the things we know from older writing, and traces the origins of the most visible modern additions. Traditional fairy lore is complex and often relates to specific places. Modern interpretations tend to be simpler and more generalised. Not only is this a guide to understanding what’s ancient and what is modern, it also gives a person tools to approach things that claim to be ancient Irish folklore in a productive way.

It was a fascinating read and I very much enjoyed it. I am no sort of Irish fairy expert, but I am a longstanding dabbler in folk traditions, so for me this book was a mix of familiar things and entirely new content. It was interesting to see how my perceptions squared with the traditional material, and I was happy to find that I haven’t acquired any pop culture fairy content and mistaken it for older stuff!

I can very much recommend this book as an interesting, and engaging piece of work, likely to be appreciated by anyone interested in fairies specifically or folklore more generally. For anyone starting out exploring fairy lore, I think it would be invaluable both in its own right and as a prompt for what else to explore.

You can find more on the publisher’s website –

https://www.johnhuntpublishing.com/moon-books/our-books/pagan-portals-aos-sidhe-irish-fair-folk

Hot, angry and sick of injustice

The UK has had a heat wave this week with temperatures far higher than anything we are used to. Climate chaos is here, and it is brutal. However, we’re not all experiencing it the same way, and there are issues of both social justice and relationship with the land involved in this.

If your home is out on the flat, or on a south facing slope you are likely to experience more heat. I’m lucky in that I’m tucked in under a hill and only get a few hours of direct sunlight on the windows. I’m also surrounded by trees, which greatly help with cooling. Compared to friends who live within a few miles of me, I’ve got off relatively lightly. The shape of the land you live on will greatly inform how you experience the heat.

The size of your accommodation is also a big factor. There may be no cool side of the house. If your room is under the roof, it’s going to be a furnace. You may not have access to other rooms – people renting a room in a house can have limited options. 

Human bodies put out heat. If there are a lot of you in a small space, this has implications.

Financial pressures mean a lot of people are living in cramped, unsuitable conditions. Building for rent has not been held to the highest of standards. Many of us live in small spaces, and those are harder to keep cool. The way in which landlords are allowed to charge a great deal for tiny, unhealthy spaces means a lot of people are suffering at the moment. Homes that won’t cool down at night put a lot of pressure on your body and will make people ill.

Climate change and social justice aren’t separate issues. How climate chaos impacts on people will depend a lot on where they live and what’s around them. Homes that are designed to keep people safe in all kinds of conditions would also reduce energy needs which would help reduce carbon output. It is always the people who are least resourced who suffer most in extreme weather conditions. It is the people who are most resourced who are most responsible for causing what’s happening. They are also the people most intent on telling us there isn’t a problem and that we shouldn’t make a fuss.

Once temperatures hit 25c or more, the risk of dogs dying is considerable. Once the air is hotter than your own core temperature, it takes care, effort and attention not to overheat. What do you do if your workplace is unbearably hot and you can’t safely function in it? If you’re the CEO, you can go home, if your office doesn’t have air conditioning. It is the lowest paid workers who will be forced to slog on, putting their health at risk.

Heat stroke can kill people. Heatwaves kill. I find that once we get to about 30c I’m good for very little. But I’m lucky because as a self employed person I can down tools, or work at different times. There’s a limit on how long I can take off to cope with the heat, but at least I have some options.

For people who are already ill, the situation is worse. For people on some meds, the meds increase sensitivity to sunlight. Being ill means probably being poorer, and therefore also more at risk from all the other issues as well.

It sickens me that our government is taking no interest in climate chaos, and is ignoring the way the economic crisis they have presided over is increasing the risk of death for people right now. On top of this, the internet has been awash with misinformation, and one Tory MP called people cowards for acting to evade the heat. Not killing people through neglect should be the least we can expect of our leaders, but we don’t even have that.

The Cold Ones – fiction

Your adoration is fascinating. How your warm, soft bodies respond to our cold, unyielding forms. We hold the perfect balance of familiar and alien. We look like you and yet we are not you, and so you are enthralled by the heady mix of beauty and horror. We are so very cold to the touch, and there is no give in us at all.

You are so moist, with your many fluids, and there are so many ways to make those liquids emerge from your soft bodies. What comes out of you is like the sea, and perhaps that makes sense. We seem dry to you, like bone or stone. You are always drawn to touch what you do not understand. We frighten you, and you love to be frightened.

Perhaps it is because of all this liquid and softness that you change so much. Your faces change moment to moment. How you stand and move alters, especially if we make the moisture come out of you. It does not seem that you can put the moisture back in, when we have finished. This is clearly a weakness and we do not understand why you have evolved this way. If too much liquid comes out, your bodies cease to function, becoming cold and hard like our own, but unlike us, you do not move when you have become properly dry.

You tell me that you love me. I can only think it means that you are happy to give your soft body as sustenance. It is, after all, the quickest way you can become like us. It makes perfect sense that you would long to be as we are. It is the only thing about you that makes any sense at all.

(Art by Dr Abbey, text by me)