LOCKDOWN LESSONS: Health Matters

During lockdown lots of things came up for people. For me, it was physical health issues. I cannot look at physical health without looking at all the other aspects of health alongside it though. I would put these in 5 categories and I believe we need them all in balance to be fully healthy. I also believe that the body and soul holds the score. I am focusing on physical health in this blog post but I shall say a little about the others to in relation to my journey of self-development. These 5 categories are physical health, psychological/ emotional/ mental health, sexual health, spiritual health and environmental health.

PHYSICAL HEALTH: Physical health is something I have largely ignored over the years apart from sporadic forays into some kind of physical activity like walking or swimming. I was never very sporty shunning it for the library in school. In many ways I was a walking dustbin shovelling anything and everything into my body regardless. I have never been a fussy eater and would eat anything. My diet was pretty unadventurous though I love food. But through tiredness, a busy life and/or financial difficulties food fast became fuel rather than enjoyment and my diet deteriorated as the years rolled by. I was raised on a healthy diet growing up on a farm with all our own home grown produce from vegetables and fruits to eggs, meats, milk and yoghurt. I always had a healthy appetite apart from under-eating in my mid-teens. I under ate in my twenties (and if I did it was usually tuna pasta, cheese toasties or kebabs) and I also drank a lot, mostly beers and spirits and I smoked. I hardly ever drank water. I danced, I walked everywhere and I was physically very fit. I was blessed with a strong constitution which alas I promptly abused and took for granted.

I over ate in my thirties and forties. During my thirties I kept a relatively good diet with fruit, vegetables, brown rice etc because I was feeding my kids too but by my forties I ate way too much meat, bread, biscuits, chocolate, cake, pizza, pasta, unhealthy carbs and convenience processed foods including frozen foods and not enough fresh vegetables and fruit by far. I never limited myself and would eat huge portions and have seconds. Basically I was comfort/ stress eating on auto-pilot. I would randomly take supplements but struggled with consistency. In my early to mid-thirties I walked a lot but in my late-thirties after developing asthma and chronic burn out I did the bare minimum. I got very bored with the food I was cooking not exploring herbs and spices as much as I wished to. 

In my thirties I drank fresh coffee every day and wine most weekends, both of which are dehydrating. I drank endless cups of tea – also dehydrating – and the odd cup of herbal tea. Luckily I put honey in my teas rather than sugar (which I always had in coffee). I rarely drank water and opted for fizzy water but I hardly ever rehydrated. My whole diet and lifestyle was hard on my liver even after I quit drinking because it was high in salt and sugar. I felt sluggish and I often dipped into my adrenaline to get going living off stress and nervous energy. I would swing between over-functioning and under-functioning.

By 45 I was in a pit. I had asthma, chronic fatigue, excessive flooding, the first signs of obesity and by 47 I had chronic anemia and vitamin D deficiency, sore knees, chronic hip pain on top of all the other problems. Clearly things were getting worse. Between the ages of 38 and 48 I gained 3 stone in weight. Enough was enough. I booked myself into a course of osteopathy and the healing began. In the following months I slowly started making small changes and then during lockdown I started a daily walk up the mountain. I aimed to eat less and move more. Since then I have cut out highly processed foods, bad sugars, unhealthy carbs and wheat. I have cut out bread and gluten. I have reduced my meat consumption greatly, I eat more fish. I eat loads of salads and vegetables, both cooked and raw. I eat smaller portions. I eat for my blood type to maximise my particular body’s potential, more on that here https://dadamo.com/txt/index.pl?1006&fbclid=IwAR2qDKPwIDAZSqAB1347emlZhJ0uulAsNc2_wI04kIRcwD2KlgjxClBpr_E

I am doing a 30-day liver cleanse by drinking 16 ounces of celery juice first thing. I take milk thistle, magnesium, zinc, spirulina, flaxseed, ginger, nettle tea and many other herb teas, tinctures and supplements as and when required. I power walk 2km every morning up a steep mountain road and sometimes another 2km in the evening – same thing. And finally I drink 2 litres of lemon water a day. I never drink alcohol or coffee anymore because it has such a bad effect on me. I drink many herb leaf teas and herbal teas. I rarely drink black tea anymore.

Physical health is wealth. I had underestimated it before because my focus was more on emotional health (which effects physical health too) but diet and lifestyle are also very important. You can do all the therapy in the world but if you eat a crap diet and are a couch potato you will eventually feel like crap because of that. Besides if therapy is working you will want to move away from stuffing down emotions with food or drink which is in essence a form of denial that ironically takes the form of over-indulgence and a kind of listless lethargy. It is very important to relax but also to move. We need a balance of both. Food is one of life's great pleasures and to be enjoyed sensibly and in moderation with occasional blow outs! ;) 

PSYCHOLOGICAL/EMOTIONAL/ MENTAL HEALTH: In many ways the realm of the emotions is the realm of the artist; feeling them, expressing them and transforming them into art or music. Artists swim in their emotions and are driven by psychological impulses to create – it is their element, be it primitive emotions or intense ones. My emotional life was an area I over-focused on because for much of my life because I was emotionally distressed in one form or another plus I considered myself to be an artist of some sort. I could never make up my mind which was my element and I explored many; dance, drawing, painting, performance, acting, music, song-writing, singing and writing. Human beings are inherently creative when it comes to psychological forces. All great literature knows that! Emotions are something that are devalued in our world and yet they are so important and at the root of much illness. Our relationship with our emotions is a deep and personal one and effects our health. Again the body holds the score and emotions that you stuff down, repress, park off or deny will show up oftentime in the body.

For me I needed to set boundaries and work on my sense of self. That has been my big work psychologically and emotionally speaking as well as developing self-acceptance and self-love. Being an extremely open person in many ways (and yet cautious, guarded and closed off in other ways – but that’s another blog post) I have always had a tendency to merge with people and become enmeshed thus losing my sense of self. This is dangerous territory as I can become bullied and controlled very easily by giving away my power like that. This has been a life-long curse for me being at the mercy of others; lovers, friends, family, you name it. I think it is rooted in my desire to accommodate and connect/empathise with and my fear of conflict or displeasing others.

Obviously I have explored this extensively in therapy. Partly it is my nature and partly it is co-dependency. I am both a curious mix of solitary and sociable. One painful lesson I have learnt is that if you allow people to disrespect you and walk all over you they invariably will. I had never assertively set boundaries in my life so I have got treated in all manner of ways. It is a very painful on-going lesson and hopefully I won’t be haunted by domineering and bossy people or manipulative people all my life. The key to all of this is setting your boundary otherwise people do not know where they stand so it is collusion if you do not. Toxic behaviour – bullying, domineering, insulting, patronising, draining or manipulating behaviours - can effect your health as badly as highly processed food or too much booze. At the same time you need to be flexible aswell. One is only brittle or defensive when they have not fully mastered boundaries. And we are all only flawed human beings at the end of the day. We can only try our best and being rigid is also bad for one’s health. Sometimes in order to make big changes we have to go to extremes which then level out as we incorporate them into our lives in a more realistic way. Diet is a good example of this. When we want to change bad habits how many of us have thrown the baby out with the bath water, as they say, only to return to our former ways. It is also important to be realistic, only then is it sustainable.

The other side of the coin is that I can be very difficult to pin down. I need a lot of space and freedom. I can be avoidant. I like to suit myself. I don’t like being needed – obviously I make exceptions here for my children. I like to get people sorted, up and running and out the door. I love to see people thrive. This isn’t to say I don’t like socialising – in fact I enjoy it immensely but only for certain amounts of time as I can get easily drained. And then I like to daydream and potter around in my own little world. I am introverted with a mad extroverted streak – which needless to say gets me into trouble but also gets me some adventures. I am pretty sure I have autism which could explain a lot but that is another blog post.

I believe that mental health is intrinsically connected to emotional health. In fact I used to call mental health issues emotional distress  as I believed they originated in unmet, unseen, unexpressed emotional truths. We can help our mental health by feeding it good nutricious food in the form of loving affirmations, critical thinking, good literature etc.

SEXUAL HEALTH: Sexual health is deeply connected to creativity and emotional, psychological and physical health I think. Some people like to explore the primal animal nature side of sex, some people like to enjoy the deep heart-felt, romantic side, some people like to wire the two up in a loving union and go to the stars. It doesn’t really matter how you get to the stars as long as you are two (or three or four… ) consenting adults.

As a side note some experts think that behind the compulsive nature of sex addiction is a deep desire for emotional connection – rather like the impulse behind alcohol, drug and food addiction or any addiction for that matter. Sex is something to be enjoyed and not to feel guilty about – unless you are harming yourself or another in a non-consensual way. Fantasy is good too. No one should police or limit your imagination because that is a boundary violation. This was something I greatly struggled with in my twenties and I crossed boyfriends’ boundaries demanding to know everything.

Sexuality is highly personal and if someone makes you feel bad about it that is not good. Nobody should judge your past because it is personal - something else I learnt the hard and painful way. There are many painful lessons in sex but there is great joy there too. Sex can give you incredible pleasure as well as transcend this dimension and take you to a spiritual place of calm. It is very good for your overall health.

On the psychological side some studies have observed that males struggle with sexual jealousy whereas females struggle with emotional intimacy jealousy. Some folks struggle with retroactive jealousy - obsessing about their partner’s past and becoming jealous. I am not sure about this but all I can say is that sex is a tremendous force of nature that can trigger and ignite a lot of feelings and can actually create new life! I think it can do that in more ways than one. Sexuality and creativity are said to be twins – represented by two entwined serpents - and you can express your sexuality through art too.

It is very important that you focus on what you like and explore your own fantasies instead of always only focusing on what your partner likes. Get in touch with your own sexuality and then share that with your partner/ lover and they will likewise then share theirs with you. Live from your own core rather than living through another. Sex can be the element that brings people closer and deepens a relationship or it can be a destructive force that tears people apart. That’s how powerful desire, passion and erotic love are! I think the more mature you are the more you can master this powerful force and align it to love. Love and sex are not necessarily the same thing  - though sex can be aligned with love - which is possibly for another blog post. Desire is something that can make you do crazy things; much literature, poetry, songs and films explore this theme.

SPIRITUAL HEALTH: Spiritual health is about deeper meaning and purpose. Why are we here? And all those questions. Spirituality aligns us with our essential self and the eternal now. The vastness of existence and existential angst are wrestled with in spiritual wisdom and texts (religious texts, occult texts, astrology etc) down through the ages. I myself have always had a somewhat eclectic spirituality believing that many paths are essentially going in the same direction - towards cosmic universal love.

My own spiritual journey has been reconnecting with the divine I felt as a child and a teen but which I strayed far from in my twenties culminating in a nervous breakdown and disconnection from spirit. In many ways it was my days of wandering in the abyss. It was my first encounter with the abyss (or underworld or void). When I was 29 years old, after a distressing and terrorising prolonged nervous breakdown of 2 years, I had what I call the Great Comforter come in through my head. I had been in the pits of despair, permanently suicidal, contemplating death for months on end and living in terror. I had asked for a sign to keep me here on earth. 

This single experience was so powerful that it brought me back into recovery and society. The experience left me highly shaken as it was impossible to put such a luminous and ecstatic experience into words – the comfort had been so peaceful, so beautiful, so full of love, so heart and earth shattering that I wept tears of joy. I could not believe such peace was possible. It was like a relief and a remembering but so intense it blew me apart. I had a similar experience after birthing my babies.

Often when I am alone I slip into the Eternal Now and experience profound peace. Sometimes I consciously meditate but mostly I drop into it without realising. There is a timelessness to these experiences which comfort me greatly and I feel part of something vast. In these spaces I like to remember people I love who have died, who are on the other side so to speak. Sometimes I wonder whether we will have sight in the next dimension; insight yes but all the things on earth that I just adore looking at and witnessing and feeling, the sensual world. I am in awe of the beauty of earth and life. Sensual bliss is different to spiritual bliss I think but I enjoy both. I suppose a little fear comes in about losing matter. 

I practice the attitude of gratitude as much as I can. Meditation and giving thanks can be a humbling and grounding practice. Spirituality is a highly personal yet universal experience and something that deepens human life. In many ways it is the great adventure. It is however important to find the balance between practical and spiritual life. Spirituality can be a bit like desire in that it can make us do crazy things. In this way, if it is not in balance, we can become what is known as bliss junkies!

ENVIRONMENTAL HEALTH: Last but not least is environmental health. This is very important as it is the foundation we build our lives on and where we get our basic security needs met. Are you living in secure accommodation? Is your water clean? Are you living in an over-crowded or polluted area? Do you have enough space? Do you have access to shops and food? These are factors that deeply effect the quality of our lives. Lockdown really highlighted this. I give thanks every day that I have a secure home, clean air and space in the countryside. Lockdown also made me realise that having a vegetable and herb garden is the way to go.