Just Plain Namaste

I recently saw a new psychiatrist. While I use Western medicine sparingly, and a little begrudgingly, I knew I was struggling enough with my grief to take any help I could get.

I'm not sure I've ever encountered 45 minutes of meditation as hard as that session was. The provider told me guilt was an incredibly normal feeling when a sibling dies, and did I feel that? I said I'd thought about it, but no, not in particular. She pressed me on this, not buying my response. Later she asked me to rate my depression, and when I said I wasn't experiencing many symptoms of depression, except for sometimes spontaneously feeling sad, she looked stunned. She asked me to rate myself on a scale. And afterwards asked if I understood 10 was good and 0 was bad, and did I mean the other way around? I found myself justifying my emotions, and explaining that I hadn't lost interest in my life, and if I didn't want to get out of bed, it was because I was anxious, not depressed. As a mental health researcher, there I was, fluent in her indices, and able to articulate exactly which ones I fit within. I responded to her questions politely and I considered them carefully.

Nonetheless, she recommended doubling my dosage of anti-depressant.

She was confident she had a better idea of how I was feeling than I did.

I suppose invalidation is the simplest word for what she was doing.

Later someone asked me if I just wasn't depressed because I wasn't very close to my brother.

And at that point I realized that this wasn't just an issue with a psychiatrist (who incidentally had a brother die in the same way and clearly expected my recovery to map onto hers). This was about faith in each others ability to hear ourselves. This was a questioning of our innate ability to access our own inner wisdom.

The absolute hardest thing about my entire grieving process was that through much of it, I was not able to hear myself. Paralyzing anxiety is paralyzing, yes. But the reason it is so devastating is because when you can only feel fear, there is no space for anything else. Your inner wisdom is entirely drowned out. Your ability to feel affection or safety or concern are lost in a wash of panic. Yes, you can try to sit with your panic, and know it better. But I have never found a way to experience panic and anything else at the same time. Our bodies are built to have a fight or flight response which uses energy from every other system in order to help us survive. It even draws blood away from the part of our forebrain that allows us to process and think through things. Don't think, just run: that is what your body is telling you.

And I lived that way for months.

And the less I could hear myself, the harder it was to make good choices for myself, and the more anxious I became. And the more anxious I became, the more alarmed I was that I no longer had any sense at all of what was best for me.

I knew I should eat three meals. And I knew I should try to sleep. In spite of not having an appetite and not being able to rest. Because a body trying to run wants neither.


So you can imagine my relief when I returned to the Christine Center and finally, for the first time in months, could begin to have some amount of insight again. You can imagine my relief when my anxiety levels dropped enough that I could actually identify an increase in anxiety and pay attention to what was triggering it (and then change my course of action). I could hear myself again.

I sat in the meditation hall almost grinning with relief to discover that something inside of myself still existed. I was still in there.

I fought hard to get that back. Though I'm pretty sure something bigger than myself helped me find it. And the issue with the psychiatrist is not that she couldn't understand what I was going through, but that she was unwilling to believe that I could hear myself. And mindfulness about how we are feeling is precious. It is the most important gift I have ever found. It should be nurtured and supported, not invalidated.

And as I work now to go through an every-day kind of life, where there are more stressors than I had during my retreat, and my anxiety can and will flare up throughout the day... I need to listen to myself all the more fervently. My anxiety is a clue from my body that something isn't right. Maybe I do need to lay in bed and read for an hour. Or maybe I need to go out with friends and laugh and act like none of this ever happened. The point is to listen like crazy, and then to be non-judging of what our insides are telling us, because there is actual wisdom in there. 

Sometimes we are around people that don't trust our ability to hear ourselves. Or worse, believe us, but impose judgement on what we find. Like suggesting my lack of depression is because I don't care that my brother is dead.

I don't think either of the people who said these things realized the implications of what they were saying. They didn't think through how telling me how I should feel suggests I'm not capable of feeling my own emotions. And then, to interpret what I'm feeling for me adds an additional burden of making me question the "goodness" of how I actually feel or my own ability to understand it.

I can forgive them. Absolutely. I'm sure I have done this to people before too. "You think HE is your soul mate?" "You did WHAT last night?" But having just come from the woods, I know how powerful it is to be surrounded by people who empower you to listen to yourself and support your own ability to understand yourself. It literally changed the course of my entire grieving process. I went from struggling to survive to being able to process and move forward again.

That is literally what Namaste means. The divine light in me sees and honors the divine light in you. It is all about recognizing God in everyone. 

So, as we all go into this new year, I hope we can all learn how to better honor and listen to each other. Everyone has their own wisdom. And it's all connected to a divine light. And if we think a friend is making a mistake or a choice we wouldn't make, maybe we should ask where our judgement of them is coming from. Might this not be their path? Don't they have their own guidance to support them? Can we honor that inner light in them so their wisdom becomes brighter and they can thrive? We don't all need to thrive in the same ways. We don't need to act as though other people are too shallow to feel their souls. Or question if they even have them. If we behave that way, perhaps it is because we don't know our own souls.

And that is where we should start.

Namaste.