Therapy day

I saw my therapist today. She and I have been working together since October 2020 on weekly basis. I really like her and I have seen a lot of growth in myself since. I had tried councillors and therapists in the past but I never fully committed.

I told her about my recent projects, blogging, the garden, trying to learn HTML and website design and about my plans to leave the veterinary industry in the next few years. She was a bit surprised by that last one. I have spoken about my reasons to leave the vet world in a previous blog post which you can read here.

Focused on not feeling

Since getting back from a recent trip to America, I have not been sleeping well. Or at least I have not been sleeping at regular times. I could pass this off as jetlag for the first few days, but it’s not jetlag. I work nights so being asleep during the day is not new to me, and I am naturally a night owl. But this is different.

I have been delaying going to sleep when I am tired because I don’t want to feel my feelings. I am still processing a recent break up. The relationship meant a lot to me. We moved to North Carolina together and planned to get married. I sold my car, packed up my things and left the only place I have ever known as home, Dublin, for this relationship. I was all in.

Things weren’t perfect between us. Far from. There were a lot of issues. We fought a lot. We stopped sleeping together. We triggered each other terribly. We couldn’t seem to figure it out. But we did, and still do at the time of writing this, love each other.

Since getting back I have been so focused, hyper focused on so many projects just to keep busy because I don’t want to feel sad. But I need to feel sad. I need to feel my feelings to process them and then move on.

Part of me doesn’t want to move on. Part of me is hoping that somehow we will magically find each other again in the future and all of our issues will just disappear. I mean never say never, this could happen. Anything is possible. But realistically, being separated by the Atlantic ocean makes it unlikely.

Just stop for a moment

My therapist listened to everything I had to say and her advice was to periodically stop throughout the day and breathe. Just stop and take a few breaths, be present. I used to hate hearing this. People often give this advise and it sound silly at first. Why would I stop and intentionally just breathe. Humans are unconscious breathers, I breathe all day every day without thinking about it.

But she is right. I haven’t been present at all this week. I have been future tripping. Focused so much on the future I have been forgetting to live in the present. And all we have is the present. The past is history, the future is a mystery but the present is a gift.

Remember to breathe

I left the session determined to put her advice into practise. Now I’ll admit, I did not stop to breathe today before writing this post. I spent the day jumping from one activity to the next. Guitar for 20 minutes, internet for an hour, guitar again, back to the internet before I sat down to write this post.

Half way through writing, I finally stopped to take a breath. The first thing that I noticed was that my shoulders were tense, I was hunched over and sitting in a very uncomfortable position. I had anxious butterflies in my stomach and I felt heavy. After a few breaths my shoulders relaxed and the butterflies settled a little. My heaviness shifted a little and I felt more relaxed.

Silence

I, like a lot of people, have struggles with my mental health. I hate sitting in a silent room because it is not silent to me. A silent room makes the thoughts louder. And there are a lot of thoughts. All at the same time all jumbled up on top of each other. I know a lot of people who experience this.

There are people out there who experience silence. One of my best friends wife for example. When she is sitting in silence, her mind is silent. My friend and I were baffled by this concept of a silent mind.

Although my mind is not silent, I have experienced it in the past. When I was 19 I was an out patient at a south Dublin mental health facility. I was seeing them for DBT. One of the main elements of this form of therapy is mindfulness. I practiced body scans and breathing exercises in an attempt to calm my mind.

I remember the first time that it actually worked. I was lying in bed, it must have been about 2am. I was lying there fretting. I was worrying about the world, how there are children starving, homelessness, crime. All terrible things in the world, but all things I have little to no control over. And I remembered to breathe. I did a body scan and relaxed my body and my mind and then I heard it. The wind. There was a storm outside and the wind was howling. I had no idea it was windy outside until that moment. I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t heard it until that point. My thoughts were deafening.

Mindfulness

Since that stage in my life I have made a conscious effort to be more mindful. I have come a long way since then, but I can slip and fall back into old ways when life gets difficult. I have gotten very lazy when it comes to practising meditation and it’s an area that I intend to improve upon.

I think a lot of us believe mindfulness meditation needs to be something you do with an instructor or this ritual that involves a quiet room and incense. While these are very good ways to meditate, it can make it seem like a big time commitment for a lot of people. But mindfulness meditation doesn’t need to be this way. Mindfulness is just being present in the moment. You can be on a busy train or a loud office and by simply taking a few deep intentional breaths, you can bring yourself back into the present moment.

So please, the next time you feel frazzled. Remember to breathe.