Healing, kindness and joy
(Nimue)
In the photo we’re in the Quantocks, having climbed a hill. It was steep, muddy, icy in places and more ambitious than any walking I’ve done in years. Behind us the wonderful view stretches away, and below but not visible is Halsway Manor where we spent the weekend on a music retreat.
Climbing a huge hill, reading music from the sheet to sing it, singing high, playing the violin with a bunch of other musicians, percussing – these are all things I used to do, and lost, and for a long time thought I would never get back. Consolidating all of those returns over a single weekend was a powerful, magical experience. I’ve come a very long way in the last couple of years, and that’s very much thanks to Keith.
I’m learning all the time about how better to support my own health. I have a few experiments on the go to see what further improvements I can make, as well. At this point it feels realistic to think that I can recover from what stress and trauma did to my body and my mental health over so many years. It’s not unlike the feeling of having fought my way to the top of a steep hill, able at last to look out over a magnificent view and appreciate what’s around me.
Kindness, support and the scope to rest when I need to have been the key factors in transforming my life. These are the answers to depression, anxiety, and to healing from or managing physical ailments. Kindness is a prerequisite for joy, I have found. If your circumstances are not kind to you, then there is little scope for joy. If you cannot be kind to yourself then again, there no room for joy. When we are kind to ourselves and each other, both joy and healing become possible.
Healing doesn’t always mean total recovery. It can well mean partial recovery, or adapting, or figuring out how to manage things in a sustainable way. All of these call for kindness. Pressure to try and achieve a full recovery isn’t always kind, although the people who do it usually imagine they are being helpful and supportive. Some of the things that are awry with my body will always be issues – but I can manage that better.
The world knocks us all about and setbacks are inevitable. Healing is something that everyone needs to do from time to time. Many of us are carrying deeper wounds – handed down family traumas, stress damage, grief over the state of the planet and more. An older friend of mine talked to me recently about how his parents, and many like them were encouraged to leave their babies to cry. How many people had early abandonment issues and insecurity thanks to this? We’re all living in unjust and unkind systems that impact on us. Finding ways to recover is an ongoing issue.
Simply being kind means we can support each other in whatever healing and recovery work we’re doing. You don’t have to know what another person is dealing with to treat them kindly, and to support them in doing what they need to do. Joy is important for healing, and a lot of mental health struggles can be tackled to at least some degree just by having time for things that make us happy.
If healing is of interest to you as part of your Druidry, this focus on kindness has a lot to offer. Simply by holding safe space where people feel allowed and supported in doing what they need to do, we can get a lot done. Slowing down and taking things gently enables healing, and this calls for us to resist capitalist pressures to be busy and ‘productive’ all the time. Seeking joy is part of the healing process, and that’s an easy thing to support each other in.
