meditation Archives - Page 3 of 8 - Diabetes Counselling Online

#Moments of #wonderful

March 28, 2014 by helwild 3 Comments

Yesterday my littlest sister flew from Melbourne to Adelaide to visit our mother, who is 91 & living with dementia in a Nursing Home. We were fortunate to be able to catch up for lunch, together with two of our other sisters, a gorgeous niece & a precious 3 yr old great niece. We actually took some photos which I will post on our Dine In for Diabetes page, when I get the time! There were 3 pwd’s at the table. LOL.That was an explosion of wonderful!

My morning had already held some good moments. I learned a long time ago that there is wonderful in the minutiae, the small details of life; a rose, a bright morning, a child putting his hand in mine spontaneously. Yesterday morning was very special. Before meeting my sisters etc for lunch, I was able to represent Diabetes Counselling Online as a Volunteer at a meeting with Channel 9 Telethon.

There were about 50 of us visiting Channel 9, representing 21 Charities. First we had a tour of the News studio, where we were treated to an “insiders’ view’ behind the scenes of how the News & Weather are put together . Then we were informed in a very professional way of all the exciting opportunities in the year ahead for Volunteering & raising funds for our own Charities. It helped that I was able to park my car in leafy North Adelaide, a large leafy square away from the studios, so that I walked across wet spongy grass, amongst roses in bright Autumn sunshine to my meeting.

I picked one of those roses, such a metaphor for life, the thorny stem, the explosion of soft scented colour at the apex. I added it to the brown paper bag that held my sister’s birthday gifts.

At lunch, one of my sisters gave us all a wonderful experience. Before Christmas, which was the first one for years where we had not held a large family gathering, we had each handed over gifts to be passed on to the children in the family. Three of those gifts had lodged at Vivienne’s home since then. They were Ruby’s gifts. Each had been bought with love. And Ruby was at lunch! So we 3 great Aunts got to give Ruby her gifts personally. Each gift was opened & appreciated with great solemnity, awe, & happiness. Her little face beamed with the unexpected delight of it all. For the rest of the day, the hearts of us old great Aunts, Ruby’s Grandma, & Ruby’s Mum were warmed by her childish sense of wonder & joy.

We said our goodbyes & headed off to our afternoons, work, driving home, & my littlest sister to the Nursing Home. We all knew there would be difficulty & sadness involved in her visit, & wished her well & thanked her.

In the early evening, I sent my littlest sister an SMS. I hoped she had a good flight, & that her visit had not been too hard. She responded: ‘There were moments of wonderful”. I knew exactly what she meant.

Two days before I had experienced some ‘moments of wonderful’ with Mum. I had rung before visiting, & Mum had spoken on the phone. She said she was fine, but was very annoyed about the weather, which was seasonably cool (it is autumn, after all). I said, yes, it is cool today, it might rain, & she replied, “I know, & I was going to play Tennis.” Mum uses a wheelchair &/or a wheelie walker to get around, her tennis days are at least 60 years behind her. But I loved her feisty response to the weather. I always dread speaking to Mum on the phone, she says, “I can’t hear you. I’m putting the phone down.” Which she does. Literally. Without hanging up. This phone call made me laugh out loud, although of course I sympathised about missing out on the Tennis, & said I’d be there to visit in half an hour.

My sister would have had some ‘moments of wonderful’ yesterday where Mum was affectionate & loving, where she appreciated that Kathryn was wheeling her about, trying to make her happy, & where she appreciated the long exhausting trip Kathryn was putting in just to visit Mum. There would also have been lots of difficult minutes & half hours, as Mum’s dementia means she can’t remember new things. Like being visited by her loving daughters. Or the conversation a moment ago where all her fears & concerns were explained & put to rest. That is a great sadness. So the metaphor of the rose fits a visit to Mum very well.

On two mornings this week I have had some tiny visitors to my garden, bringing me some tiny ‘moments of wonderful’. Little native birds, White Eyes, hanging upside down in the wild fennel I grow just for them. Apparently flowers & seeds are equally tasty. I can watch them through my bedroom window, lying in bed in the morning light.

Living with diabetes is never easy. We cannot forget about it, or ignore it: if we do so it is at our peril. The stress is very great. We have to be responsible, sensible, pro active. We can get so caught up in our problems, complexities, responsibilities that we forget to notice the ‘moments of wonderful’ that happen almost every day. It’s easy to focus on pain, on difficulty, on practicality; on guilt, on wanting; on dissatisfaction, anger, or resentment. The negatives clamour for our attention. By noticing the small ‘moments of wonderful’, we become intrinsically peaceful, more accepting, philosophical. We become Mindful, we remember to live in the moment. Those difficult things become easier to bear, to manage, to work through, to let go; or to change.

Helen Wilde

Helen is a Senior Counsellor with Diabetes Counselling Online, Teacher, and parent to someone living with Type 1 diabetes since 1979. She has been living with Type 2 diabetes herself since 2001.

Please Share!

Fear, Anxiety & Feeling Trapped: The Train To Freedom

March 26, 2014 by Helen-Edwards 2 Comments

Happiness is a feeling and a place all of us strive for, yet sadness and a range of uncomfortable emotions are part of life and in fact we must experience these, in order to have happiness. To me, a sense of freedom and control are vital to my own happiness. I think growing up with type 1 diabetes, a disease which requires a supreme level of skill in control, has something to answer for here. Yet I know earlier events in my life, as well as my personality, have a part to play here too. I need to feel free, have license to create, not feel shackled, in order to be at peace. I think that comes of being a creative soul.

Have you ever felt trapped in a situation you no longer want to be part of? Or reached a goal you thought you wanted, only to find when you arrive there, it is not all it was cracked up to be?

I have. And it sucks.

There is nothing in the world that stresses me more than the feeling of being trapped. Either physically or mentally. A sense that I have lost control over a situation or my life, can affect me just as much as being physically trapped. I can track most of my highest periods of stress, sadness, depression and anxiety, back to feeling trapped. This goes back, I believe, to situations in childhood, where I was actually really, physically trapped and later, was reinforced by events and situations in my life.

Eventually this evolved, after suffering post traumatic stress disorder, into a kind of agoraphobia, which was ironic for someone who already suffered with claustrophobia….At one point of my life, the young woman who had once spent her time in the thick of the mosh pit at concerts, going out 2 – 3 nights a week to noisy bars and clubs, loving to socialise, turned into a virtual hermit, who would run from the supermarket part way around as the bright lights made everything too stark, too bright, too loud, too frightening. Who would not get her hair cut for months on end in the fear of “what if” a panic attack hit part way through a colour and she was trapped due to having foils on her hair. Who avoided doctor’s and any other appointments where she may be “trapped”. Who had an anxiety attack so severe at the local football grand finals, 4 months pregnant in the early September Adelaide heat, that she actually went temporarily blind, there was nothing but white…until she got out of the ground. I guess that is what “blind fear” is all about.

After the terrible experiences of violence and abuse I was exposed to over the years in both my work, and my own life, I became paralysed by fear, and at that time in my life was frightened of nothing, and of everything.

Flick forwards and this is a long, long ago memory. I am back to my bubbly, outgoing self, even more feisty than I have ever been, a fighter, a champion of ideas. I can stand up in front of hundreds of people at a 10,000+ International Congress and present a major piece of research. I am brave, a risk taker and I am strong. I now sit through hours at the hairdresser, love to go shopping and have not had an anxiety attack for many years. I built a national charity from nothing but an idea around a family lunch. I am a successful Entrepreneur of ideas and spend most of my days blissfully happy working on my interiors business and my diabetes charity, as well as studying.

Yet that old reaction to a feeling of being trapped still wraps itself around my life from time to time. I created a career that revolves around being a bit of a hermit and that suits me well as a creative, spending hours alone creating blog posts, developing ideas, writing, drawing, researching and working on new creative projects, yet somehow, in one aspect of my life, the goals I was working towards have become tainted by systems, by too many cooks & the very bureaucracy which I sought to support the idea in the first place.

Yes, sometimes arriving at a destination you had wanted can end up being the wrong town after all. How you get back on the train and turn it onto a different track, remains the challenge. But you know what? I think I have traveled enough tracks to work out how to do that, full steam ahead.

Happy travels.

Helen

Helen Edwards is the founder of Diabetes Counselling Online, type 1 diabetic since 1979, mum of three and blogger and interiors stylist at www.recycledinteriors.org

Please Share!

It’s not easy to be me- journeying to the #self: how #melancholy is part of #happiness

March 13, 2014 by helwild 2 Comments

Our inalienable rights are ‘Life, Liberty & the Pursuit of Happiness’- nothing in there about Health, or Wellness, right?

I was counselling someone today, someone who is actually older than I am, despite me having just had a birthday & feeling extremely ‘senior’ as a result. LOL! I had something of a ‘light bulb’ moment. I thought, it’s not depression that I live with, it’s melancholy. And is that such a bad thing? Once you realise your own mortality, which for many people is actually before the age of 10, isn’t melancholy part of the background to our lives? It’s not a word that is used or celebrated nowadays, it could even be called ‘unfashionable’ to acknowledge melancholy. It seems that you have to be always ‘happy’ to be considered ‘normal’: if you’re not obviously happy, then you must be ‘depressed’. I don’t believe that’s true.

Although melancholy gets a bad press sometimes, being equated with deep depression, it has also a more poetic & lighter side. Many poets, composers, artists, writers from various cultures have felt melancholy. ‘Melancholy is sadness that has taken on lightness’ by Italo Calvino ‘There is no such thing as happiness, only lesser shades of melancholy.’ Robert Burton. ‘Sweet bird, that shun the noise of folly, most musical, most melancholy!’ John Milton and ‘There is no coming to consciousness without pain.’ Carl Jung. When you can acknowledge that it’s actually OK to be sad, not permanently deliriously happy, to be in fact somewhat melancholy, you can accept your state of being & find that ‘happiness’ & ‘beauty’ can encompass melancholy. ‘I don’t want to get to the end of my life and find that I just lived the length of it. I want to have lived the width of it as well.’ Dianne Ackerman

Of course that melancholy can be a spiderweb, it can creep into everything, it still takes work to maintain calm in the midst of chaos: to maintain serenity, joy. The tools of mental wellness remain the same. We are all living with diabetes. Now that’s just not fair. It basically sucks. At the same time, many of us are trying so hard to ‘live our lives to the full’, whatever that may mean. Whether it’s helping others, striving for a physical ‘high’ that will reward us, striving to be successful in a career, or in love, earning more money to purchase whatever it seems we want; our time is busy busy busy. Multi tasking is a way of life. We are attached to screens for much of our waking time. We are ‘communicating’ with more people than ever before in the history of the world. We need to take ‘down time’, & to use that time to be present in the real world. This might be as simple as exchanging our gym session for exercise outdoors, appreciating the world as it passes us by. It might be turning off screens for a 2 hour waking period every day: or for an entire day a week, & focussing on the people we are with & the world around us. Or to be alone. It might be remembering we have more than 3 senses: more than our eyes, ears & fingers. It might be reminding ourselves that we are more than our diabetes, or our child’s diabetes, that we still have other interests, & other people in our lives. It might be focussing on Breathing, on silence, on music: on watching your child sleep. It might be preparing and eating a meal with pleasure, not guilt, sharing our pleasure with others, not with self judgement or self criticism. It might be that we need to give ourselves a break, to celebrate how hard we are trying, to let go of guilt or shame. We need to use that wise voice in our head to counsel ourselves as we would another, to be kind to ourselves as to another, to say, ‘It’s OK, nobody’s perfect, you’re doing OK’.

It can be hard being Superman, or Superwoman. Even Superman feels melancholy sometimes.

Helen Wilde

Helen is a Senior Counsellor with Diabetes Counselling Online, Teacher, parent of a person living with Type 1 diabetes since 1979, & living with Type 2 diabetes herself since 2002.

You may find it helpful to talk with one of our team by visiting http://www.diabetescounselling.com.au/welcome/our-team-counsellors-ambassadors/

)

Please Share!

Why you should run in the rain

March 12, 2014 by Helen-Edwards Leave a Comment

Sometimes I have so much going on inside me that I feel like I could burst. Thoughts, feelings, dreams, ideas, all jumbled and tumbled inside my head. Welling up inside my heart and spilling out through my eyes in salty tears. I am just an ordinary girl but I have dreams. Many dreams. And I feel so deeply. Is that what creativity is? Sometimes I need to take some time to be in nature, be inspired, connect with the basics. It is surprising what comes after having this time. I am often inspired, moved, relaxed and happy.

Today it was hot humid, sticky. Not a pleasant day. We waited with anticipation for the inevitable change that rides in on the wind with a rain storm after these kinds of unbearable days. The release of the change, the cooling of the breeze, the patter of the rain falling gently on the roof calling you to come and dance.

Today was also my middle son’s 15th birthday. Another of my children heading as fast as possible towards manhood. I had a party to put together, yet I needed to fit some exercise in between work and getting the party ready. I looked at the sky and listened to the rain and my immediate thoughts were that I would have to head indoors, to the gym. Yet I yearned to be out in the fresh air. I went with my heart and set out into the gently falling drops of rain.

As I felt the rain on my face, I turned my cheeks upwards, like a sunflower seeking the sun. My energy was supercharged as I headed up into the national park that lies close enough to my doorstep to run through a couple of times a week. It was a sensory feast. The scent of damp earth, not yet washed deeply, just dappled by the little fairy droplets, the sweet aroma of the lemon gums wafted through the entire park. It was quite simply magnificent. The water brings out the colour in the trees and grasses and the Australian blue green was everywhere, shimmering and glistening through the watery sheen.

Forgetting the fact that my type 1 diabetes, as it has a tendency to do, interfered and stopped me mid flight, this was one of the best runs I have had in a very long time. Sometimes, taking a risk, striding out into the rain when the sensible thing to do would be to stay indoors, is the very thing you need to do. It awakens you. Inspires. Calms and engages you all at the same time. It makes you realise that there is more to life. That you can do things another way and, be happy. I find inspiration, ideas, creativity, flow out of this time.

I arrived home wet, sweaty, Ben Folds in my ears, with low blood glucose and a happy heart, just as my parents arrived home with my 5 year old and my husband arrived home from work. “Everyone is here!” said my son (the birthday boy), as he opened the door.

Yes we are I thought. And how lucky we are. I looked up one more time to the rain, eyes closed and heart open and turned to making a party.

If you have never done it, make sure you run in the rain at least once in your life. Otherwise you might regret it.

Helen

Helen Edwards is the founder of Diabetes Counselling Online, type 1 diabetic since 1979, mum of three and blogger and interiors stylist at www.recycledinteriors.org

Please Share!

it’s my birthday…je ne regrette rien..carpe diem

February 28, 2014 by helwild Leave a Comment

Today is my birthday. At my age, this a cause for celebrations, enjoying the now, and appreciating what I have. It is also a time for some looking back & thinking about what has gone. For me, the past is very important. It informs my present, and my future, but it does not define, restrict, or contain these things. My past is now very long, much longer than my future. Yet every moment in it was just that, a moment. Much of the time I lived in that moment, although I am a ‘planner’, even sometimes called an ‘over thinker’ by some members of my family. I am blessed with a very visual & sensory memory. I can recall scenes in detail & colour, I can recall smells, tastes, conversations, music, embraces.

Some of this I put down to just that, it’s a blessing I was born with. I can remember vividly some scenes, not many, from before I was 5 years old, when I lived with my family in post war England. Three memories in particular, and a couple more on the ship that brought us to Australia. One on the bus from Adelaide to Whyalla. But some of it I think comes from a philosophical stance or attitude, & some partly from mind training through years of yoga & mindfulness practice.

One thing I have learned over time, and that is how to let things go. Much of life is spent hanging on to things. These can be relationships, hurts, precious treasures, even hopes or ambitions. It can mean the control of others, or the control of material possessions. Hey, we all know of individuals who cannot find satisfaction in life no matter how big their house, their fortune, or the number of marriages they’ve had. They fill popular culture with their pointless ‘gathering’ & hoarding of life’s riches & experiences. Growing older teaches you that life is finite, that it’s about the experiences & relationships we find on our journey, not about accumulating. My parents believed wholeheartedly in this. At retirement after Dad’s retrenchment, they had no income other than the OAP. They spent the last 20 years of their marriage travelling Australia in a little caravan, on the old age pension. They were barefoot in the sea at Caldwell, rugged up & sleeping in the back of a station wagon in the mountains of Tasmania. They ate fish they caught themselves, dressed up & attended ‘Shows’ in the casinos on the Gold Coast, and spent time back ‘home’ in Adelaide in caravan parks helping with grandchildren over the school holidays.

Today my sister & her husband are flying off on their ‘retirement trip’. They are heading for a snowy, freezing England, our birthplace. They plan a 6 month caravan adventure, in Britain & Europe. Although when I saw my sister at Brunch for her birthday last month they were planning to also caravan in Spain, she did say that maybe they’ll just settle in Cornwall for the whole of spring & summer.

Travelling isn’t everyone’s dream, particularly not travelling on a tight budget. I enjoy it, but at this point in my life, I don’t want to spend more than a couple of weeks away from family, young grandchildren, aging mothers, working daughters. I do enjoy many other, smaller things. Every day I find something to take delight in, a feather, a walk in the hills, a day’s babysitting my only grand daughter who is a 3 year old doll. I manage my physical health to the best of my ability, following up with doctors, allied health, tests etc. But I don’t worry about it. I have decided it is what it is. My father taught me that physical pain is just that, & is not something to be allowed to dominate one’s thoughts, nor to be held onto, nor hidden behind. Life itself is a journey. We know our destination, it is what we are born for. Knowing our mortality and accepting it becomes remarkably freeing.

Our journey and happiness are ours to choose.

Non, je ne regrette rien..carpe diem

Helen Wilde

Helen is a Senior Counsellor with Diabetes Counselling Online, Teacher, parent of a person with Type 1 diabetes since 1979, and lives with Type 2 diabetes herself.

Please Share!