I don’t want to jinx it but my first week in full lock-down has been one of the most pleasant I’ve had in a long while.
Certainly there were moments when I could feel rising irritations: usually spurred on by the riff-raff, alarmist, cabal of misinformation fearmongers on social media an inane WhatsApp groups. Somehow though e in the back of my mind something seemed to stop my usual nebulous triggers that lead to full blown mania.
Naturally I needed to unpack why this last week was a pretty good one to say the week before which was a shit show – to put it mildly. There was a list of things that I thought I’d share here, but when assessing the list as a whole one theme stood out and it was glaringly obvious: mindfulness.
The occupational therapists at the psychiatric hospital waxed lyrical about ‘mindfulness’ pretty much every day during my last stint there. That and ‘boundaries’. Boundaries is my nemesis, but that post for another day.
Trust me when I say that I’ve approached ‘mindfulness’ with unwaivering cynicism.
So, what’s mindfulness then?
The short answer is that it’s is a technique used in cognitive-behavioral therapy used in the treatment of some or other cognitive or behavioral mental illness, like bipolar. For the most part the manifestation of this treatment is through meditative practices. As in the kind of meditation with sound of the ocean and some guy recording ‘feel the energy in your core’ in his closet.
While I wasn’t meditating for half the day, I’m convinced that this national lockdown has, in a way, forced many people to introspect and take stock of where they are now and where they’re going.
For others, like myself, the lock-down has yielded more than an introspection.
Rather it’s revealed a capacity of awareness of my thoughts in a way that I’ve truly understood the where, how and why of those thoughts – and been ok with that which I don’t understand. With this new found awareness, the space to think and the capability to process what would usually trigger a manic episode, I have been able act with restraint after to ruminating on the things that I usually find been distressing, threatening or stressful.
All these contributors of mindfulness have, at least for me, curbed my usual instinct to change, fix, interfere, bully, shame etc. and instead afforded me, at least for this week, the ability to disengage emotionally with the things I cannot change, fix or remedy as an individual overnight.
[Needs Editing]
