Now

One aspect of my mental health journey has been my battle with some of the skills, some of the tools that professionals and therapists equip us with for our toolbox when suffering.

In the midst of low mood, high anxiety and occasional manic periods, I have kept the routine of mindfulness (meditation) going but I have felt often that I have got very little from it, made very little progress, seen only brief escape from the melting pit of my anxietal thoughts.  At times it felt torturous, it felt boring but it was a routine I kept to.  You look into your mind and it's not a great place, teh distractions from peace, from the breath are many.  My head is clogged with overthinking and negative predictions and the mindfulness wasn't helping.

However, as I recover and I think that's the stage I'm in now I can see the benefits of this toolset, I can see that even when I'm not in the mood, which is normally the case, it is a good thing to do.  With PT you see the effects of your gym work but with Mindfulness it's not so obvious. However, I'm beginning to think that I'm buiding up a part of my brain that I hope will mean that rather than ruminate, eventually the normality will be to ignore the negative thoughts, paying attention to the breath and the positive rather then being hauled off to some awful future or enlarged guilt that the mind seduces me to follow rather than the 'now', the safety of the 'now'.

I'm sort of beginning to understand that if you want peace then sometimes you need to think that there is only 'now' at those times and that 'now' is a safe place to be.

It's not a be all and end all cure, it's a tool, it's something that appears to work under the right circumstances.  It's worth persevering with.