Interesting things happening inside my skull just lately. Over the last four days I’ve had periods when I hit rock bottom. Yes, though I am a rough tough Essex boy SF writer, there was crying involved. But it was all a bit odd because I would go through that then come back out of it quite quickly. I wondered if my depression was being exacerbated by the dull grey weather here and I was heading downhill, but it just wasn’t like that. I then remembered something and checked up on some of the effects of meditation and there it is. This is just one of the many references to it scattered across the internet:
“…initially, meditation can involve a lot of upheaval as those parts of you that are blocking your inner peace and happiness come to the surface to be released.
This means that there will be times when meditation feels very uncomfortable and you may experience a lot of unpleasant emotions.
You may feel very sad for no particular reason, and find yourself crying at the drop of a hat. You may get irritable, anxious, angry, snappy – but you don’t know why. You may feel a tremendous sense of grief, or a thousand other types of emotion.
This is all very normal. In fact, it is highly beneficial, for when you experience such emotional release you know you are healing yourself.”
Being me, I would of course prefer a more factual description but reluctantly accept that this covers it. I do, however, pull back when this stuff starts wandering into spiritualism and mysticism. My brain is a computer that has been running for some time. A lot of rubbish has accumulated, some of the programs are a bit wonky and, since there is no ‘reset to factory settings’ other methods have to be found to get it working properly.
Anyway, yesterday I woke up feeling a bit crap again, but soldiered on and went to my 11.00 o’clock appointment with a hypnotherapist. The session was pretty much what I’d been getting from some of the hypnotic/meditation recordings I was already using but, okay, this was supposed to be a clear out of the accumulated junk in my skull. I drove back from this feeling pretty good, but then crashed in the early afternoon. This lasted to about 4.00 when I started to come up again.
At some point I got up and set to work on that chair I’ve been repairing – that one that’s been in pieces on my living room carpet for a week. I cleaned out its joints and glued and clamped it. As afternoon progressed into evening I wrote in my journal, and read (a book on mindfulness) and played on the internet. As bedtime approached I found myself feeling something I had not felt for some time. I didn’t want to go to bed because I wanted to carry on feeling like I had felt all that evening.
So was this the result of the hypnotherapy or did that just top off what I had already been doing with the recordings? Is it my growing mindful awareness working? Who can say? All I know is that I also feel good this morning and really want this to continue. I have further appointments with the hypnotherapist and some reading to do of something called the ‘Thrive’ program.
But, right now, to work. These books don’t write themselves you know.