Tag: Writing for Wellness

Managing the Seasons of Chronic Illness – Summer

In a previous post,  I discussed the season of winter in the progress of our chronic illness.  There I explored “wintering” as a way to move beyond the darkness, despondency, despair and debilitation that accompanies the experience of winter in the progression of our chronic illness.  Wintering, in this context, involves “letting the light in” through rest, renewal and regeneration.  In my accompanying poem about wintering, I explored what it meant for me during a particular period of darkness.

In our August Creative Meetup, Jennifer Crystal read an extract from her book, One Tick Stopped the Clock, as a stimulus piece for writing in our group of writers-with-chronic-illness.  The extract focused on the hope associated with the arrival of summer following a period of winter.  In the extract, Jennifer recounts her desperation in the face of her totally debilitating Lyme Disease.  At the time, she had a catheter feeding intravenous antibiotics through her arm and chest cavity to her heart.  She was grossly sleep-deprived, suffered migraines , battled a health insurance company for her reimbursement entitlements, and experienced brain fog.

Jennifer sought help from a therapist as well as a specialist in Lyme disease who was a member of ILADS (International Lyme and Associated Diseases Society).  Jennifer’s therapist, Michelle, spoke to her about her dreams that involved Jennifer water skiing.  In an earlier period, Jennifer was unable to water-ski but had been able to drive the boat for other water skiers.  The literal interpretation of her dream suggested that she was missing the ability to water ski herself.  However, Michelle suggested that a metaphorical interpretation was that the dream reflected “loss” in a broader sense – the loss of a positive and productive  life style that preceded Jennifer’s debilitation from Lyme Disease.

Michelle suggested that even though Jennifer should be in the “summer of her life” at age 27, the summer would come and the experienced winter of her chronic illness would pass.  The future onset of summer represented hope for a better quality of life.  Michelle questioned Jennifer’s disbelief in the possibility of experiencing “the summer of her life”.  Jennifer expressed her doubts when Michele said, “you can live a happy, fun, fruitful life once you are well”.  Jennifer has gone on to publish her book despite her personal hardships, and become a story coach and trainer, author of a weekly column for the  Global Lyme Alliance and facilitator for the Creative Meetup group, hosted by the Health Story Collaborative.

Creative Meetup Process – Writing Prompts

Following the reading of the stimulus material, we were invited to address one of the following writing prompts:

  • Write about something that you have lost as a result of chronic illness.
  • What have you replaced or how have you transformed this loss?
  • How would you describe the season of your current illness?

I decided to address these prompts together because they were interdependent.

The loss I focused on was my inability to play social tennis during the cold seasons of the year because of chronic arthritis in the joint of the middle finger of my right hand.  The cold weather aggravates the arthritis which is also aggravated by allergies (allergic arthritis brought on by MCAS).  However, I have been able to replace my social tennis with weekly social pickleball which also enables me to play more consistently because I play it indoors and am not subject to the vagaries of the weather (or exposed to cold winds).  While I still have to manage the arthritis in my finger, the impact of hitting the ball is not as great or painful as it was with tennis.

The Summer of my medical condition

When I thought about where I was up to with managing my current chronic health conditions, I thought of summer – a season of hope.  I have located a general medical practitioner who is an immunologist and very willing to explore a range of treatment options.  She is also willing to listen and not jump to conclusions. 

Pickleball has been a very effective and rewarding replacement for my social tennis.  The gains through pickleball are many and varied:

  • New knowledge and skills
  • The opportunity to continuously learn
  • The chance to try out new shots – experiment
  • The ability to build on existing competence in shot making and strategic play built up over many years of tennis (more than 60 years)
  • A new form of exercise and increased motivation to stay fit.

Pickleball has transformed my weekly social, physical activity so that it is not as demanding as playing tennis.  It also provides a range of new rewards:

  • Joy from experiencing new competence (intermediate level pickleball skills)
  • Developing new friendships
  • Fun with playing with different partners in a social environment (the requirement to “play nice”, rather than all-out competitively)
  • Social support from people who are also aged and experiencing physical limitations
  • The enjoyment of looking forward to catching up with my pickleball group and playing more games.

When I reflect on my current medical condition, I can appreciate that in many senses I am experiencing a summer of my chronic illness.  I have framed my present state as “summer” because of what I have achieved or am achieving:

Reflection

I’ve recognised that a prerequisite for managing chronic illness is acknowledging that there will be ups and downs, times of moving forward and other times of regressing – there will be winters and summers of our chronic illness experience.  For each of the seasons of our medical condition, there are strategies that we can use to heal and recover.  One of these is the process of writing.

If we can grow in mindfulness through practices such as Tai Chi, meditation and mindful walking, we can learn to reframe our situation, express gratitude for what he have and can do and access our creativity to explore healing options.  There is a lot of helpful information on the Internet that is readily available to us if we choose to look.  The real test is in the application of what we learn. 

Dexter Dunphy and Bob Dick, in their book Organizational Change by Choice, provide a relevant quote from an anonymous author (p. 126):

To look is one thing
To see what you look at is another
To understand what you see is a third
To learn from what you understand is something else
But to act on what you learn is all that really matters.

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This post is provided for information purposes only and is not intended to replace personal medical advice provided by a trained medical practitioner.  Please seek advice from a qualified professional before deciding on treatments for yourself or other members of your family.

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Image by Jürgen from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield- Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution-Non-Commercial -No Derivatives.

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.

Mindfulness Meditation for Full Catastrophe Living

In the movie Zorba the Greek, Alexis Zorba contends, “I’m a man, so I married. Wife, children, house, everything. The full catastrophe.”   Jon Kabat-Zinn draws on this analogy in writing his landmark book, Full Catastrophe Living, in which he contends that mindfulness meditation enables us to “make use of the full spectrum of our experiences, the good, the bad, and the ugly”.  He argues that mindfulness meditation helps us to deal with “what comes our way” as part of the human condition and to do so in ways that are both healing and deeply nourishing.

In his book, Jon draws heavily on the mind-body connection to show how we can use our inner wisdom “to cope with stress, pain and illness” and demonstrates how mindfulness meditation facilitates this interconnectedness.  He contends that through mindfulness practices, we can experience not only joy and satisfaction but also suffering in a positive way that enriches our life.

In his book, he explains the benefits of mindfulness meditation, drawing on scientific evidence and the researched benefits of the Stress Reduction Clinic which had been operating for 25 years at the time of his writing, with “over 16,000 medical patients completing its eight-week program”.  His aim in writing the book was to make the practice of mindfulness meditation and its benefits readily accessible to people in everyday living –  contending with the vicissitudes of life in an ever-increasingly, fast-paced world.  To this end he describes in detail a range of mindfulness practices that can be employed by anybody as part of their daily living.

The nature of Mindfulness Meditation

Jon makes the point that in the Stress Reduction Clinic the facilitators don’t do anything for the patients apart from giving them “permission to live their moments fully and completely”.  He states that mindfulness meditation is “non-doing”, by “being in the moment”.   Through this process of paying attention to their minds and bodies – becoming fully in touch with themselves – patients come to terms with “the full catastrophe that can make life more joyful and richer”.

In the final analysis, participants in mindfulness meditation achieve a new way of seeing their situation, a “way of awareness” that is characterised by wholeness instead of fragmentation.  The challenge for participants is to “stop doing” and to “start being”.  Given the “non-doing” nature of mindfulness meditation, it is self-defeating to set a specific goal for the practice such as lower blood pressure, heal a specific illness or overcome reactivity.  Such goal-oriented behaviours are the product of a doing-culture.

Mindfulness meditation draws its healing power in part from addressing our thought patterns.  Jon points out the research that highlights how our thought patterns, beliefs, emotions and attitudes can “harm or heal”.   Our thought patterns are pervasive, impacting every aspect of our life as they:

  • lie behind our motives and choices
  • determine how we perceive the world and ourself
  • shape our level of confidence in our ability to achieve things
  • underpin our beliefs about how the world works and “what our place in it is”.

Research shows that thought patterns can impact our health and contrasts the positive impact of optimism versus the negative impact of pessimism.  It also highlights the power of self-efficacy (belief in your ability to achieve/succeed) and its capacity to influence your ability to grow and develop.

Mindfulness Meditation practices     

In Full Catastrophe Living, Jon highlights a range of mindfulness meditation practices that we can engage in at any time during our day.  He makes the point that the deciding factor in how beneficial the practices are is not how perfectly you do them but the regularity with which you practise.  Here are some thoughts on the anchors for each of the practices he mentions:

  • Breath – is fundamental to our existence, without it we are not alive.  Jon describes breathing as “the unsuspected ally in the healing process”.   The basic process he advocates  involves getting in touch with our breathing, focusing on the rise and fall of our abdomen or chest or the sensation of air entering and leaving our nostrils.  The aim here is not to try to control our breath but to be aware of it happening and noticing its character – fast/slow, easy/laboured,  deep/shallow.  Resting in our breath can be healing and relaxing.   Beyond this basic process of being in touch with our breath as it happens there are various techniques available to us at anytime to consciously vary our breath.  We can breathe with intention or adopt one of the breathing exercises advocated by James Nestor such as  resonant breathing or box breathing.  Alternatively, we can adopt “rhythmic breathing”, advocated by Richard Wolf as a form of mindfulness meditation. 
  • Sounds – listening to sounds as you meditate, “hearing what is there to be heard, moment by moment”.  It does not involve “listening for sounds” nor judging the quality, duration or resonance of what we hear.  Jon maintains that we can treat the sounds as “pure sound”  and simultaneously be conscious of the space between – the silences that occur whether we are listening to music or sounds in nature.  He encourages us to breathe the sounds into our body and “letting them flow out again on the outbreath”.  Listening to sounds can occur in any meditation posture – sitting, standing, lying down or walking.
  • Sitting meditation – Jon advocates this form of meditation as a way to “nourish the domain of being”. as a counter to incessant moving and doing. He maintains that we can employ several objects of attention (anchors) in the process of a sitting meditation, including our breath, sounds, our whole body or our feelings and thoughts.  Jon suggests that you can start this form of meditation by first being grounded in your breath so that you are not easily carried away by the content of your thoughts or feelings.  In relation to your feelings, he recommends that you observe your moods and associated feelings and thoughts “as they come and go”.  When focusing on thoughts he reminds us that they are “impermanent”, coming and going often at speed.  He says the challenge is to identify the “me” thoughts and to be able to delineate thoughts associated with anger or resentment,  greed or clinging.  Jon maintains that this type of mindfulness meditation is taxing and should only be done for short periods. 
  • Walking meditation – involves consciously “attending to the experience of walking itself”.  This may involve recognising the marvellous coordination of the whole body required to be able to walk or acknowledging with gratitude that you are able to walk at all (while there are numerous people who are unable to do so).  It could involve focusing on the sensations in your legs or feet but not looking at your feet.  Jon indicated that in the Stress Reduction Clinic, people walk in circles or in a straight line to avoid goal-oriented walking – focusing on the act of walking not the destination.  He suggests that when you pay more attention to the process of walking, “you appreciate that it is an amazing balancing act”.  Barriers we can experience in undertaking a walking meditation can include loss of balance, strong emotions and invading thoughts.

Reflection

What Jon describes in the above mindfulness meditations can be undertaken anywhere, anytime.  They can become a part of a daily routine and/or a spontaneous mindfulness practice in the midst of doing other things.  The more frequently we undertake routine mindfulness practice, the more we can grow in mindfulness and become spontaneously mindful of our bodies and our surroundings.

In Ella Ward’s novel, The Cicada House, her main character, Caitlin, comments that the wind through the trees sounds like waves.  After reading that comment, I spontaneously paid attention to the strong winds blowing  from the Bay through the trees to our back deck. As I focused on the sound of the wind amongst the trees, I could sense the sound of waves rising and falling.

My reflection on Jon’s discussion of mindfulness meditation led to the following poem:

Mindful Walking

Walking with intent,
process not destination.

Grateful for the balance and coordination,
grateful that I can walk.

Focusing on the sensations of feet and legs,
feeling pressure on the soles.

Listening to sounds,
hearing the birds,
above and below, in front and behind, to the left and the right.

The world of “doing” falling behind,
overtaken by “being”.

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Image by 춘성 강 from Pixabay

By Ron Passfield- Copyright (Creative Commons license, Attribution-Non-Commercial -No Derivatives.

Disclosure: If you purchase a product through this site, I may earn a commission which will help to pay for the site, the associated Meetup group and the resources to support the blog.