BLOG

Advice For Difficult Seasonal Transitions (From A Chronically Seasonally Depressed Human)

September 3, 2018 by Must Love Crows Leave a Comment

Seasonal transitions have always proven to be tough for me.

I love the sun. I thrive when it’s warm outside. When the temperature drops, and it’s no longer weather appropriate to be bare-legged in a lounge chair with my computer, notebook, or latest non-fiction obsession, I enter into a period of mourning.

I don’t anticipate quite the difficulty as I’ve had over the past few years, but I’m still a bit weary. I’m not sure what will come about when the skies get grayer, and Vancouver Island starts to live up to its reputation as a rainforest.

I’ve recently upped my belief in the fact that everything is going to be OK, and that I will be OK, no matter what happens in my life. So that’s comforting when I start to feel uncomfortable with all the changes weather wise.

But that doesn’t mean the transition to fall isn’t capable of rocking me to the emotional core.

Something inside has a tendency to fight what is this time of year. It’s prone to clenching and refusing the universal need for the leaves to fall, the temperatures to cool, and the diminishing amounts of sun to be available to baste my body.

Something within doesn’t want to accept the changes.

I experience a lot of uncomfortable physical symptoms in the fall, too. Digestive issues (Will spare the details and you’re welcome for that); super dry skin; heavy depression; intense anxiety: all of them come on strong and are hesitant to let up on demand.

Remembering that everything is temporary when experiencing all the discomfort is, well, comforting. Sitting with how I feel isn’t. Letting things get emotionally messy is messy, and I don’t like messes.

But the alternative, of looking to the not so recent past and feeling bummed out over how fast the summer went, and wishing and hoping for more time in the sun, always proves to be a tempting, albeit terrible, idea.

Until I’m ready to see what was with lightness and look at summer with gratitude instead of fear over its passing, I need to leave it where it lay. I need to get to acceptance of what is first; Acceptance of right now. And I always get there, but not until I go through what feels like a spiritually led mourning period.

I believe this: That there is more to the struggle I feel during the seasonal change into Fall than just the passing of summer; That the feelings are too heavy and deep to be from missing my favorite river or lakeside spot alone.

Regardless of the origin of my feelings, my goal this year is to get outside the realm of discomfort over what is with greater speed. I don’t want to set up shop with depression and anxiety. My plan to make sure that doesn’t happen?

Do things differently than I’ve always done them during the seasonal transition.

If you’ve read much of what I write about on the blog, or in the twice-a-month-ish emails I send out, you’ll know that doing things differently is what I’m all about these days. Because doing things differently is the key to emotional growth.

Which is why recently I’ve been scanning through the last couple years, to the times when seasonal depression and anxiety started taking up square footage in my body like a great dane in a studio apartment. Not with a critical, self-shaming eye, but a clinical one. And I’ve asked myself:

What did you do when you struggled with difficult seasonal transitions in years past?

Here’s what I came up with:

I stopped posting and connecting with people on social media. I couldn’t think of anything positive to write about or share, ’cause I felt so down, so I just stopped posting altogether. I was gone long enough that friends started messaging me, asking if I was OK. So I isolated myself from my community and it definitely didn’t help me out.

I ate shitty food. Gluten much? How about Gluten too much. Plus dairy, pork, canola oil, corn, refined sugar, and salt: You name it, I ate it when I was feeling depressed. I’m a huge follower of the medical medium and have seen incredible results from following his suggested eating plans via his books, which you can read about in this post. So I know from repeated food-related emotional and physical upheaval throughout the year that September is not a good month to be trifling (Damn, I love a good trifle) with all the stuff on my “Don’t Eat This Stuff” list.

I was less active. Recovering from drug and alcohol addiction and the depression and trauma that fueled them taught me that when I’m experiencing heavy doses of depression I need to move my body. Which is tough because when I feel depressed I don’t want to be active. Case in point the last few years, when I dialed back my work out routine substantially in the fall, ’cause I had zero motivation. Needless to say, not doing anything made me feel worse.

I ran from my feelings by buying stuff. The last few years I’ve done a fair bit of running. Not around the block – I’m talking running from how I felt via emotional purchases. Tons of cash spent at the vitamin store for supplements in order to fix how I felt; make-up counter visits in hopes a new product would make me feel (and look) better; a surplus of books, some of which haven’t even been cracked yet: none of it helped. It just kept me busy while siphoning my savings account. Yuck.

I didn’t take time to be grateful. I was so consumed with fear over how uncomfortable I felt that I couldn’t see how it could ever get better. I stopped practicing being grateful and it made things way worse.

After all that investigating, it became clear that I needed a plan this year. Even though I feel like a different person – stronger, more empowered, and grateful than in years past – I still need to be ready, in case the same symptoms come about again.

So I made a plan for the transition to Fall and it goes like this:

Remain open to my community. I’m going to share what the transition teaches me on social media and on the blog. I’ll be mindful of the delivery, ie, keep my heart open, and ensure I share empowering yet honest content. And I’m going to make plans with friends, for the near and faraway future, instead of hanging solo all the time. Adding fun stuff to the calendar always feels good, no matter how far away it is (TGFJ = Thank God For Jen, who likes to plan ahead like I do.)

Write it out. I’m going to use how I feel as content inspiration for my blog, my book, and my workbook. This is a good chance to get introspective about what I’m feeling.

Not let depression make choices for me. Depression isn’t something I need to be listening to for health advice, so I’m not going to listen when it makes the super shitty suggestion that I numb my brain with entertainment shows, lay in bed all day, shop away my feelings, or eat bags of cheddar popcorn. Nuh-uh. Nuhhhh-uhhhhh.

Up my healthy eating game. The proof is in the dairy-free pudding (I’ve never tried making that but it feels like it’s google worthy): Shitty food equals a shitty frame of mind, body, and soul. I’m going to cut out the crap when I feel like crap and keep my house stocked with healthy foods so it’s easier to dismiss depression’s suggestion that I start eating cake at every meal.

Move my body. This is one of those cases where I have to get tough love-ish with myself: Even if I don’t feel like doing anything when I’m feeling down and out, I need to do it anyway. I’m not saying I need to sign up for CrossFit (though if that’s your thing, go get ’em, babe.) I’m saying move my body a bit, ie, walk around the block, or do one beginner yoga class per week – something that gets the blood flowing. Nothing good comes of stagnation, mentally or physically. I know this VERY well. Lighter equals, well, lighter. And I’m not talking about my waistline. Everything feels a little less heavy when you make time to move your bod.

Sit with my feelings. I’m going to notice when I feel like running by eating or shopping and sit with my how I feel instead. I’m going to go all Buddha on that “Hey – you should do this thing that will make you feel worse!” suggestion that I KNOW will be coming my way on the regular. Will it feel great to sit with how I feel? Not likely. But it’s temporary, and the sooner I am courageous enough to do so, the sooner my discomfort will pass. (I wrote more about this idea, of sitting with your discomfort, in this post.

Meditate more often. One of my Instagram friends, @remindmeditation, recently said: “Meditation isn’t hard. Learning organic chemistry is hard. Winning an Ironman is hard. Giving birth is tough AF. Meditation is easy. You can meditate.”

And Jaylee is right: You can meditate. We can all meditate. And while I don’t think meditating for long periods of time is easy, I DO think we sabotage ourselves by saying it’s too hard to even attempt. I do it to myself sometimes, particularly when I’m feeling depressed, and that’s an everyday meditator admitting that.

A way around the “I don’t want to, even though I know it’ll help me” is by lowering the bar. Making 1-5 minutes of meditation the goal is much less daunting than trying to force 20 minutes when you’re just not that into it. And it makes it more likely that you’ll actually do it. So less self-sabotage + more doing what feels doable = self-care, self-love, self-empowerment. The math checks out. I checked it.

Seasonal transitions can be tough. What makes them even tougher?

When you don’t have a plan to deal with the issues that might come with the changing of seasons.

Experience has taught me that waiting until things get hard is not a good plan. Having a plan is a good plan.

You might need to look at what didn’t work for you in the past, like I did, to sort out what helps provide relief, empowerment, and motivation when times get difficult.

One thing you can do right now? Share something you plan to do this year, to help you mentally transition into fall in the comments below.

You never know who you could be helping by doing so, so please take a moment to share your thoughts. And after that grab a copy of my One Minute Meditation Guide, which is a great tool to add to your Fall Wellness toolkit.

Now, I’m going to give Fall, cause it’s truly here on Vancouver Island, a warm welcome, even though it’s not exactly warm, and offer a reminder to you:

Be kind to yourself during seasonal transitions. It’s so very human, to struggle during times of change.

The 3 Phases of Courage

August 16, 2018 by Must Love Crows Leave a Comment

Everyone has things they don’t like doing. My least favourite thing to do? Put flea medication on my cat, Jack.

Jack has a special place in my heart. No joke, he helped save my life. When I was struggling with sobriety, he showed up at my door, looking for love.

Love Heals. The love I felt for him was one of the catalysts that helped me figure out how to love myself. So the cliché about rescuing animals is absolutely true in this case: I saved him just as much as he saved me.

Over the past few weeks, my little fur dude’s activity of choice has been scratching himself. If my suspicions were correct – that he had fleas – it would mean I’d have to apply flea medication, which, not surprisingly, was on his list of least favourite activities as well.

The coldness on his neck from the alcohol in the meds freaks him the fuck out, which breaks my heart because the little man already has PTSD (his previous owner died tragically.) That said I’m keen on locating some hard proof before I start the process.

Unfortunately for both of us, I found one crawling on his face the other day. I was bummed, to say the least. What we had to do (it takes two to apply it) came with the added bonus of being shamed and ostracized.

And no, I’m not talking about the Facebook comments section: this is what Jack the cat does to us humans when we apply the stuff.

We applied it anyway. The other option was him being uncomfortable and our home getting ransacked with fleas. Not happening.

True to form, he freaked out. He tried to outrun the feeling on his neck down the driveway, up the driveway, into the backyard, and into the neighbour’s yard.

Shortly after his run began, however, he stopped to sit in a pile of dirt. I watched from the window (’cause he needed his space) as he sat down and closed his eyes, looking like a tiny, furry little buddha. There he stayed for over an hour.

Somewhere amidst my intermittent window watching and dishwashing, something profound came to me:

Was he uncomfortable? Yes.

Did he realize that there was no way to outrun his discomfort? Yes.

Did he continue to try to outrun his discomfort? No.

To a cat, it’s logical to stop running. They don’t have a bunch of human conditioning, clogging up their minds.

But for a human, it takes courage to stop.

In the mind of a human, what Jack did was courageous. He could have kept trying to outrun the feeling, and ignored me and the hubby for days. But he knew that he’d just end up suffering more.

So he let himself sit in that dirt pile for a bit, and watching him do so got me thinking:

We need to get used to sitting in the dirt pile with our feelings, too.

Feeling shitty is temporary. So is feeling happy. Where we get ourselves into trouble is when we diagnose feeling terrible as permanent and shut ourselves off from the chance to feel better, by refusing to let ourselves feel how we feel for any length of time.

I remember when I used to immediately red flag any feeling that didn’t feel good. I’d either head straight to the doctor, thinking I needed to up my antidepressant dosage, or else I’d make myself feel even worse by maxing out my credit card on clothes I didn’t need and racking up a bar tab I couldn’t afford.

I would diagnose myself as seriously screwed up, all for being human and having an off day.

It’s not bad to feel unhappy, and it takes courage to stop trying to outrun our unhappiness.

In my case, investigating and sitting with my unhappiness has taught me how to be courageous.

I’ve come to know 3 phases of Courage:

The first phase – Noticing that you’ve normalized behavior that is unhealthy, like running from how you feel.

Just witnessing that you’re doing this, and how it might not be working for you, is Courageous.

The second phase – Doing things differently the next time you notice you’re ready to extend that same behaviour.

Courage is changing things up: If you’ve always done it one way, try another.

The third phase – Continuing to try to do things differently, in spite of failing to do so.

Courage is committing to doing things differently the next time around.

Acts of Courage, in whatever form or degree they come in, are powerful.

Any time you choose to do things differently than you’ve always done them, it’s a win, not only for you but for the people and the world around you, too.

No act of courage goes unnoticed by the world.

Despite the lack of a pat on the back or a “Way to go, babe!” there are heaps of people being positively affected by your efforts to be well.

You are setting an amazing example simply by trying to do things differently.

Don’t stop setting examples. Don’t stop being courageous, in whatever phase you can manage to at the moment.

Thanks for reading. You are loved,

Thoughts About Things Falling Apart

August 3, 2018 by Must Love Crows Leave a Comment

It’s Friday and it’s been one hell of a week. Maybe you feel the same?

Personal issues that have my heart feeling like a yo-yo? Check. Mercury retrograde getting me feeling a certain shade of yikes? Check. Sleep issues? Check.

I can’t help but feel like things are falling apart.

What do we do when things feel like they’re falling apart? I know what I used to do: Make a home in my pain. I felt the return of that act this morning. I was drafting a response to the awful response from the other party in a lawsuit I’m in the midst of when I felt a familiar sort of uncomfortable radiating from my stomach.

It felt constricting, and immediately took away my desire to eat or drink, and yet, I kinda liked it.

It made me feel shaky and sick like I wanted to throw up, yet still, I kinda liked it.

It was volatile, and wavered with intensity depending on the tone of the words I either typed or erased in the document I felt consumed with populating.

To be blunt, it felt fucking terrible, yet still, I kinda liked it.

So I asked myself the obvious: “Why do you like this? Why are you continuing to do this, even though it is causing you to suffer? What is happening here?”

I didn’t wait for an answer or try to diagnose it. I just stopped typing and the feeling went away. And when the idea came up that I should continue to type, the feeling returned.

“Not like this,” I said to myself, though the words didn’t seem to come from me.

I realized then that I was so very, very tired of trying so hard at things that caused me so much emotional turmoil. I was tired of digging my own emotional grave, and I wanted to continue my commitment to doing things differently.

Different to me means not causing myself harm; it means being unwaveringly kind to myself, no matter how other people might treat me. Choosing to take this path dictates that whatever brings me the opposite of that pit of dread responding to an essay of lies and personal attacks initiated is where I need to go.

So I erased the parts of the letter that were harsh, and replaced them with words that were lighter and more loving. And yes – I sent love to the person who tried to minimize me with misogyny.

This is a moment if there ever was a moment; This is profound; This Oprah “aha” worthy.

I am very, very proud of who I am and the strength I have uncovered through my research and my commitment to doing things differently. Every step I’ve taken has allowed me to witness my pain, instead of allowing pain to run my show.

I make the choices now – Not pain, and not other people who are in pain, either.

I am so very grateful for my capacity to forgive, even in the face of unwavering efforts to minimize me. And yes, this week has had some challenges – the last two weeks, really – but it’s all worth it because of this moment, and my capacity to sift the good from the unsavory.

That said, I truly care about all of you. I don’t need to know you personally to wish you well and remind you with my whole heart how important it is that no matter what you do this weekend, you be loving to yourself.

In the face of confusion or feeling like things are falling apart, self-kindness is the answer.

❤️

PS: I’d love to connect with you! I send out an email twice a month-ish with new content and resources.

Subscribers get access to my One Minute Meditation guide for free, so enter your name and email here.

Waiting For Bravery

July 26, 2018 by Must Love Crows Leave a Comment

The only reason we don’t open our hearts and minds to other people is that they trigger confusion in us that we don’t feel brave enough or sane enough to deal with.

– Pema Chodron

Bravery isn’t always with us. Its variable existence is often why we do one hell of a job dancing between keeping our hearts open and closed to one another.

Sometimes we’re not ready to see what’s happening below the surface of our drive to call someone an asshole. Sometimes we’re not ready to hit up the “What’s alive in you is alive in me as well” sweet spot.

To not want to open our heart to someone is the path to opening it. We have to feel how much doing the same thing we’ve always done feels. We have to wait it out in that prickly spot of feeling confused and uncomfortable until bravery comes to guide us in the direction of, “She’s super impatient and rude and thinks everyone else has a problem but her, and I did the same thing yesterday to the hubby.”

Noticing that you’re keeping your heart closed is a great substitute for self-shaming in the absence of bravery to open it. Are you choked at someone? How very OK and human of you. Is it possible you might not be ready to dig into what’s going on below the surface of your anger towards someone? Heck yes. Is there a chance the behavior you witnessed is triggering you ’cause it might be emulating your own? Give me a hell yeah (when you’re ready to give one.)

To summarize: Go easy on yourself while you wait.

The Power Of Not Taking Things Personally

July 6, 2018 by Must Love Crows Leave a Comment

I was at an event recently when I came into contact with a self-admitted twitter troll.

The dude walked up to me, and followed up his hello by asking me what the name of my blog, Must Love COWS, was all about, and questioned why there was no theme to what I wrote about.

Being human, and having the life experiences I’ve had, I found his interrogation approach pretty gross. I mean, the reference to Cows instead of Crows was a dose of contempt that surprised me for sure – there are no cows in my logo. But I made a vow (Hah! We were at a wedding!) to let that shit go, and process it later.

But life didn’t like my plan to process it later. During a discussion with a cousin, I was interrupted by the dude again, with the question, “Why do you hire a copy editor?” I turned to him with a smile on my face and said, “Because sometimes I hire a copy editor.”

“Oh,” he said, his face softening ever so slightly. And then he began the descent into his admission of love for getting into arguments with people online.

That was the moment my frustration with his shitty behavior instantaneously melted away. His favorite pastime is picking fights with total strangers, I thought to myself. It all makes sense: His interrogation had nothing at all to do with me, it had to do with his own pain.

Thankfully dessert had just been served, so I left the table because I can do that, leave conversations I don’t want to be a part of, and swapped out the sadness in his words for a brownie. And while I ate the food I was already too full to eat I started up a mini internal self-therapy session that went like this:

I’ve experienced pain to the degree that I wanted other people to hurt, too. It’s been a long while since I’ve wanted to take it to the point of trolling strangers online, but I know what it feels like, to boil over with contempt as a result of internalized pain I was too afraid to process.

I started to make guesses about why he felt the need to be so aggressive, too, to help release the need to keep being pissed off:

When it comes to his seemingly calculated interrogation of me, maybe he thinks I need to be taken down a peg for being female and having a platform, like so many people like to do in the Huffington Post comments section?

Maybe he’s jealous, and doesn’t think I deserve a platform? Maybe he thinks he’s smarter, and more talented than me — that his name should be in the byline, not mine?

Maybe he’s lonely? Maybe he’s desperate to connect with others, but no one wants to because he is so aggressive? Because of that, maybe he’s willing to go to any means necessary to get attention?

Maybe he was raised in the absence of important lessons, just like I was? And maybe he doesn’t realize that true connection requires an open heart, not a latched-closed one, and that you can’t create connection when every word and action is led by fear? (’Cause dude is scared shitless of something.)

Whatever the reason might be, my experience, of feeling deeply offended and then quickly being unburdened by those feelings, provided a huge growth moment.

I realized — again — the power of not take things personally.

You can read books about it and know without a doubt in your logical mind that taking things personally is counterproductive. But it’s the stories we tell ourselves that have the power to help us move away from being habitually offended by everyone who is rude to us.

Being human, and living with the program I have running through my head means that I’m not done learning lessons in the Don’t Take Things Personally department. But the turnaround from being offended to knowing that there is always something deeper going on behind the scenes than our habitually hyper-defense tactics allow us to realize, is coming along quicker than it used to these days.

A mentor of mine recently told me something super non-spiritual that I loved, and that is that sometimes, people can be dicks. And there’s a reason they act like dicks, but it’s up to them to figure out why and do the work required to heal, not us.

When we realize it’s not our job to reprimand and correct, we don’t have to work so hard at coming up with sarcastic or equally dick-ish ways to clap-back; rather, it becomes about being kind to ourselves by noticing our feelings without creating more shame to process, and giving the truth some time to surface.

And trust me, the truth will surface. Sometimes it even shows up at the same time dessert does. 😬

Lessons From This Week, Volume 1

June 27, 2018 by Must Love Crows Leave a Comment

I’m in the midst of writing a book and it’s proving to be quite the undertaking. Not that I thought it would be easy. Hell no. I just didn’t realize how overwhelmed I would feel when I started to write it. 😬

The process is providing a powerful lesson in staying present.

All the in-the-future tasks required to make this book a reality have been doing some serious loitering as I search for the right words to fill the pages. Suffice it to say, my mind has been wandering a lot.

What does this teach me? That I need to focus on staying in the moment.

Some days I’m better at it than others. At times my inability to focus feels like a curse. I experience moments, sometimes days, and even weeks when my brain is firing off so many thoughts I don’t even feel safe being behind the wheel of the car.

Meditation helps. It realigns me with my purpose. So does eating the right foods (Glucose from fruit = great for ADD type symptoms.)

And so does logic. I know the power in considering options for the future, like, “What’s the cover going to look like?” and “Who should I hire to edit this thing?” but logic affirms that busying myself with tasks beyond writing the actual book isn’t a top priority right now.

I also know what drives the barrage of thoughts that pull me from the task of writing: my sub-conscious, trying to keep me safe from making an ass of myself.

I do feel a bit freaked out about the whole writing a book process. But I also feel serenely secure in the realization that this is what I’m meant to do.

Of course, I’d like to live in the serenely secure zone more often. Fearing failure sucks the joy out of things, a process we all experience to a certain degree or another.

There’s a subconsciously driven aspect to all of us that makes a job of trying to convince us to not do what will catapult us into a realm of ourselves we’ve never known.

Here are the big questions that freak our freakin’ freak, whether we realize it or not:

Who would we be if we did the work we needed to do to accomplish our goals?

What would happen to us?

No one knows, and that scares the shit out of us. That fear entices us to busy ourselves with things that won’t help us do what we need to do to accomplish what we want to accomplish.

Mark Nepo is a poet and the author of a beautiful book, called The Book of Awakening (check out this post from my resource section to learn more about it.)

He speaks about pain in a way that resonates deeply with me, and it relates just as well to fear: Our life contains pain, not the other way around. That is, our pain does not contain us; our life contains pain.

I look at fear the same way: It’s something that comes about in our lives on occasion but it’s not meant to be the dictator of our everyday existence.

Fear has a proven talent for messing with our ability to be calm, generous, and connected to each other.

It takes from us; it depletes us. Therefore, it’s not qualified to be the director, star, or producer of our lives.

And besides, there are plenty of other feelings to feel other than fear. From what I know about myself, and from what I witness in the actions and words of the people close to me, we give fear way too fucking much of our time and energy.

Consider who we can be without it: In the absence of fear, I am calm, generous, and accepting of others. I am no longer at war with the world or myself.

Without fear I can say, “I can handle it,” and I do. I pick up my pen or laptop without difficulty and focus on writing a book, the contents of which might be able to help others.

So the lesson this week is to stop giving fear so much damn attention. To stop letting it contain us.

We do that by focusing on what we’re doing right now, in the moment. If thoughts about yesterday, tomorrow, or next month come up, we reroute our focus back to right now. And then we do it over, and over, and over again.

It’s not glamorous; It’s not profound or exciting. It’s not the easy way out, or the quick fix to happiness we relentlessly search for, yet never find.

It takes work and commitment but there’s nothing quite as lovely as being unburdened by the drain of relentless thinking by focusing on the present moment.

The peace of mind, body, and soul that comes when you focus on what you’re doing, even if it’s something you perceive to be simple, like making a plate of food for yourself or your loved ones, is undeniable.

You deserve to feel that, and so do I.

Which is why I’m making a commitment to stepping into now, with both 2 feet when it comes to writing this book and living my life moving forward.

I’m going to use the observation of the now to keep fear from directing my life. I know it won’t be easy, and that some days I might fail miserably.

But I’m going to keep working on being present, rerouting my wandering mind, and no longer letting fear contain me. And I hope you’ll consider doing the same. ❤

Fun Fact: This post was originally one of my bi-weekly newsletters.

SaveSave