December 10, 2008

• Back to Blogging with a New Wellness!

  Once again I’ve had a prolonged lapse in posting.  Thanks to a few gentle nudges from xangan friends though, I am trying again to catch up!  Winding towards the end of yet another year, I find myself reflecting back over 2008.  One delightful development I will expand on more in a subsequent post is that I am now in a wonderful intimate relationship.  Also, what strikes me most strongly about my personal journey over the year in review is how very, very grateful I am for the improved wellness I have been fortunate enough to experience and enjoy throughout the majority of this year!  At times it has felt like a true miracle that my mental, emotional, and spiritual health has been ever so much greater this year after a long dark stretch.
  
  It is hard to know exactly how this healing happened, but I suspect it involved a synergistic combination of various diverse factors.  After so many years of seemingly fruitless struggle, I really feel like things are finally coming together.  I feel such tremendous gratitude to have finally reached this place of grace along my life’s journey.  I believe adoption of and immersion in a more nature-based, spiritual, and simpler life has been absolutely invaluable.  I believe that these critical changes in conjunction with alternative healing modalities, and medical, educational, and counseling approaches to healing mental illness, and also having people and animals to love and be loved by, have collectively aided me in reaching a new wellness which I hope will prove very long-lasting. 
  
  I am phrasing this in terms of reaching a new wellness rather than “a recovery from illness” intentionally.  Kathleen Crowley has coined a term, “procovery,” for just this type of distinction — and has written a great book about it which I have cited below.  For me, this distinction reflects the fact that I do believe I have made very important progress, even though I have not “recovered” in the sense of regaining an ability to return to work, regaining a more comfortable economic status or more respected social status, or regaining an ability to sustain a more sophisticated style or standard of living.  In this sense, I continue to fall short of many of the socially sanctioned markers for our culture, however as I’ll touch on more below I feel in some ways much healthier in my current life.
  
  As I have mentioned in previous posts, after struggling over so many years with the debilitation, despair and angish associated with clinical depression and anxiety, my own concepts around success have changed markedly.  I discovered that the strong importance and pull social status and keeping up with the Jonses once held for me became far less valuable, and even counterproductive or dangerous for me to pursue when just living consumed all of my energy and ability to focus.  Conventional standards for success like those I have been describing become unrealistic goals in such circumstances, and adherence to them at such times is a sure recipe for feeling like or identifying as a failure.
  
  One of the more painful parts of this journey, but perhaps in the long run one of the more rewarding, has been feeling forced to create modified standards for success so I would not continue to feel like a failure.  The new concepts for success I am coming to are based primarily on the achievement of communion with nature and spirit, and of inner peace, compassion, mindfulness, and love.  There is much less emphasis on material achievements, prestige, or social status for me now.  Perhaps the greatest irony for me is that I had not achieved lasting happiness or health when I was doing what I thought proper, pursuing and achieving social status and material security and luxury.  Even, that is, while working in a career I felt passionate about, environmental protection, and receiving accolades almost up until my total collapse six years ago – and yet, collapse I did under the oppressive weight of anxiety and depression.  The prestige, etc. couldn’t cure me.
  
  So, ironically this deep sense of wellness has come only after first losing everything, and then trudging painfully through seemingly endless years of predominately darkness, only to discover that in the process I am finding a new sort of light.  I am now finally discovering that I am actually building a whole new life which is actually working well for me.  It is based around such different standards, but they seem to fit on a deeper level than the old ones ever did.  One of the gifts of this process has been that my ability to appreciate that most awesome marvel of simply appreciating feeling well, in good spirits or at peace, has grown exponentially.  And, the gift of grace now of getting to feel that way and appreciate it! 
  
  Another gift has been despite becoming on some levels disabled and in many ways because of it, I have also become an ecological steward protecting, restoring, and enhancing a home nestled in a peaceful forest.  I am so grateful for the wonders of nature and for immersion in them.  And, for learning that I can enjoy a simpler lifestyle with fewer luxuries and fewer things.  And for realizing that I now feel like a much healthier person, much more balanced holistically in body, mind, soul, and spirit than I ever did when I outwardly resembled a conventionally successful person.  May such miracles continue and may they warm the hearts and fuel the hopes of all who suffer!
  
  

  • 9:45 pm
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