Slow Sunday, reflections & managing stress

Another beautiful sunrise where leafless trees look like fireworks, silhouetted. The sun rising across wet red-tiled roofs, and the tree out front starting to lose it’s leaves now. The frost of yesterday has given way to rain, and the air is milder. Worms fall asleep under the surface of the soil. Seagulls swoop through air currents high in the sky, while wood pigeons and magpies rest on rooftops. Soon, people along the road who have children, will be filling their windows with festive images made of coloured tissue paper, lit up by lamplights behind, and others will string lights through their hedges. As evening draws in, and skies turn dark, our road will become a Christmas wonderland. I’ve been thinking about how much has happened since last Christmas, in the world and in my own life; perhaps in yours.

Love in strange places

This time last year my mum died—it was what she wanted as she had dementia and wanted to go before it got too bad. She felt she had had her life and it was time to move on. Because of this she cut down on her eating until she was just consuming a few pieces of galaxy chocolate and a teaspoon of jam each day. My mum was 85 when she went, and that last year was full of love, but in ways that were unexpected.

I wrote a short piece after mum died, I may have put this up before, but I’m going to pop it up again, in case it helps anyone.

Sometimes it’s an act of love not to clean the coffee table

My mum had a coffee table, and a few other things that needed a good scrub, but…

My mum was someone who never bothered about housework, she just didn’t care, it irritated her when people fussed with cleaning and she thought they were daft, that was just her. She liked to paint and write stories, and be in nature, she lived in her imagination and just wasn’t interested in her home surroundings.

Last year as she moved towards the next chapter, she wanted every well meaning person to leave her alone, so that she could decay in her own way along with her home—she experienced it as an extension of herself.

When we tried to clean and sort things out, she felt as though we were cleaning and sorting her out and it upset her. She wanted to be allowed to decay along with her familiar surroundings. She wanted to stare out of the window and watch the clouds and trees.

I learnt to just sit with her, because then she was at peace. She liked me to stare out of the window with her.

This was her chosen way and once I ‘got’ that, once I was able to just ‘be’ with things exactly as they were, rather than trying to ‘brighten and clean’ things up—in honesty so that people wouldn’t think I didn’t care—there grew an unspoken peace between us, which remains to this day. There was a lifelong healing in that, but I don’t think anyone would have known.

Sometimes it’s an act of love not to scrub the coffee table.

If you are in this position, don’t worry what anyone thinks of you, don’t pass judgement on youself for not doing enough, know that sitting with a persons heart is the only thing that you both take with you.

Mum moved on, in October last year. The cremation was a pragmatic affair that went well, in November, but the real farewell was on Christmas Eve. As a family—me and my children and my sister and her family—we all went to Tenby in Wales for Christmas and on Christmas Eve we took mum down to the beach. It was a stormy day with winds and heavy rain, bitter cold. But when we arrived at the beach the rain stopped and the sun came through the clouds, in a shaft. We walked into that shaft of golden sunlight that painted itself across the sea and sand, and my sister made a tiny hole in the corner of the bag, so that our mum could fly free into the sunshine. The rest of us stood back a little watching, as the dust of a life once lived blew into the sunbeam.

It was a perfect day.

I’m sharing this because I learnt a lot about humility and kindness. I was left thinking that it is those two things that help to navigate difficult things in life, in the world; how they bring a person into their heart. And this got me thinking about the opposite, what takes people out of their heart.

When hearts seem to disappear

When I was learning about how the brain works, I learnt there is a part of the brain that is conscious which allows us to think, reflect and be creative and, that we also have a subconscious survival brain working away 24/7.

The survival brain looks out for what may threaten us. It can only refer back to patterns stored in the subconscious and it has the power to shut down the part of the brain that allows us to be intelligent, to reflect and be mindful.

As stress levels build in the brain throughout the day, they get stored. At night during REM sleep the brain processes them and they get filed away, the next morning we wake up refreshed. The problem comes when the brain doesn’t process everything, when it becomes overloaded and the amount or quality of REM sleep isn’t able to process all the stresses.

As the brain struggles in this, the survival brain starts to take over from the rational, reasoning, intelligent, spacious, creative part of the brain. If stress levels suddenly become very high, for instance when the survival brain decides a situation could be life threatening, it can even shut down the reasoning intelligent part of the brain completely. And, the survival brain can only operate from anger, anxiety, depression, and negative/obsessive thought processes. This means that it cannot reason its way out of a problem, it can only unconsciously refer back to past patterns stored in the subconscious.

That understanding has been a nugget of gold to me, helping me to realise that when people behave from a place of hatred and do horrible things, it is because they have lost the connection with the part of the brain that can reflect intelligently, the part that gives us our humanity. They fear for their survival, and the actual feeling of love in their heart, is not accessible.

This understanding makes it possibly for me to hold them in my heart. And that experience has led me to think that humility—recognising that someones behaviour could be mine if I’d had the same experiences, that had caused the humane part of my brain to shut down—and kindness, are the most important things needed in the world right now. And that’s why I want to help people reduce stress levels, by engaging their brains in positive reflections and conversations.

How would it be?

That’s a good question to ask I discovered, when faced with life threatening situations, or things the brain experiences in that way—you’ll know because the survival brain will spring into action with anxiety or anger or depression and negative thinking.

When we ask the question, how would it be? Or what would it feel like? We have to fire up positive neural networks to answer, and the positive, solution focused thoughts help the brain feel less stressed.

The survival brain doesn’t know the difference between what is real and what is imagined, and so imagining the positive, allows the survival brain to calm down; to perceive there is no longer a life threatening situation to take command of.

To manage your own stress levels you can do this as part of a night time routine, followed by relaxing your brain with music, a relaxation recording or yoga nidra, before going to sleep. It will help you slip into nourishing REM sleep.

It’s all about planting seeds, really. If you plant an acorn seed, you get an oak.

Recipe

Cardamon, rose & cacao almond balls

These are sweet, cosy and chewy. I blended soft medjool dates (1 cup), with ground almonds (1 cup), warm liquid ghee (2 tablespoons), freshly ground cardamon seed (2 teaspoons), a little black pepper, a pinch of salt and a few drops of rose water. I didn’t put them in the fridge because I wanted to keep their chewiness.

Tonight I’m going to dream of tree collards, and I will plant some next year on the allotment I’m looking after. This picture was taken while I walked the Camino, there were lots of small fields of them along part of the route, where the red soil started to turn brown.

Wishing you the warmest,

Lucy x