Following the breadcrumbs to improve mental health

[indigo22]

Hi everyone,

The last few months have been somewhat confusing as I have discovered more about my mental / physical health and how it has all been connected. I had not put the pieces together, I am not sure why, it seems so obvious now.

I have dealt with Dysthymia since about 12 and Major Depression since about 14 but was not diagnosed until my 40s and had no idea that had been the problem all along. I knew I wasn't like everyone else but thought I was just born that way. Back then mental health was not a subject that was openly discussed and the signs mostly went unrecognised and untreated. I had about 10 years of talk therapy with a social worker that helped immensely.

I have had a sensitive digestive system for a good portion of my life, not so much that I sought treatment, just things like indigestion with certain foods, bloating and the like. I suppose I thought everyone had those types of issues.

I have also had nervous system reactions over the past 15 years, like involuntary shaking in certain situations, that I had put down to getting older and being less resilient having been through a lot of difficult challenges.

I have been seeing a psychotherapist who also does somatic work (turns out you were right mmmekitty, I did need some more help). The first session of somatic work, in this case EFT (tapping), brought up a deep and long standing belief that I did not deserve to be helped. The emotions were buried so deep that I was not even aware of them. After that session things went haywire physically for a few days and took some weeks to start to settle.

Being the type of person who needs to have an understanding of what is happening and why, I have been reading many books on the symptoms I have had. That is when I began to join the dots about how interconnected by mental and physical health actually were. It has required a lot of processing on my part, and an acknowledgement of what I have been consciously unaware of, but it has been necessary to finding a way forward. This will be an ongoing journey as new symptoms show up that need to be looked at.

I know now that there is a lot of unreleased trauma in my body that is a contributing factor in not healing mentally or physically and I know now what needs to be done to improve. There is only so much that the medical profession can do, I believe the rest of the responsibility lies with us in digging deeper to find the causes and the answers. In many ways, that in itself becomes empowering.

Take care all.

indigo

[Eagle Ray]

Hello dear indigo,

Sending you a big, supportive hug 💗 It's really tough having those days. It can feel so heavy, even when you know future days will be better. I hope you wake up feeling better tomorrow.

I think I might purchase the Avalon book as it would be the quickest and easiest way to get it. I can really relate to the value of being outside in the moonlight. I have always found moonlight medicinal. I'm in a beautiful place for enjoying moonlight and have numerous locations I could go to and just be under it. I can also just lie in my backyard and absorb it. The naturopath highly recommended golden kiwi fruit to me and that was great for a period of time. Then when I developed histamine intolerance I suddenly couldn't eat it any more as it is quite a strong histamine and tyramine liberator in the body. I would get a strong reaction. So at the moment I can't have it but I do hope I can again soon.

Yes, the nightmares do subside when hormones lift up again. It is clearly linked. I am learning to cope with the nightmares. It's like the hormonal crashes strip back all the psychic defences in me with regard to traumas and fears and I can do nothing to stop them being present in such a forthright way. But at least it allows me to face and see my fears and traumas directly with absolutely zero filters. It kind of makes everything crystal clear.

I've just returned from the most lovely walk by the river. I took some photos on my phone of the clouds reflecting on the water. It was such a beautiful atmosphere. I wish I could share the images here to show you.

Take care indigo and much kindness and love to you,

ER

[Eagle Ray]

Dear indigo,

Just checking in to see how you are feeling today? No need to respond if you don’t want to as I know you may not feel up to communicating. I hope you are doing ok and that perhaps the current depressive symptoms may be beginning to make some sense or be starting to resolve at least a little.

I’m having a quiet, restful day after driving to another town yesterday to visit friends. I hope you are having a restful weekend.

Warm supportive hugs 🤗💗

ER

[indigo22]

Hi ER,

Thank you for checking in, that's so kind of you. I hope you are starting to feel a little better now too.

I am beginning to come out of it now, just feeling really tired and my sleep patterns have been all over the place for a couple of weeks which may be part of the cause. The sleep patterns seem to be my sign that something is bothering me (or lacking in me). I had a strong urge to buy some olives, maybe they have something in them I need at the moment.

It's been a hot one today so haven't ventured out much until about an hour ago to give my plants a good drink and their fortnightly dose of maxicrop. It's definitely a salad night as it's still about 26 degrees at 8pm, I do love warm evenings in the summer.

I hope you had a lovely visit with your friends yesterday, a change of scenery and good company never goes astray. I need to do another trip to the town I went to recently on Monday or Tuesday so I hope I can get some long hours of sleep tonight.

Enjoy your restful evening and the rest of the weekend.

Hugs,

indigo 💜

[Eagle Ray]

Hello indigo,

I’m glad you are coming out of it now. Yes, sleep patterns being all over the place can be a sign of something. Mine have been very haywire - not sleeping at night but often crashing in the afternoon. I know a lot of it’s hormonal with me but I’m also feeling that I’m going through a time of transformation, not just hormonally but in terms of my whole emotional being. It’s like I’m recalibrating as a person as I work through stuff. So I wonder too if you have a lot of subconscious emotional processing going on? I think we can sort of pendulate (to borrow from Peter Levine) between different states, and sometimes we fall back into a pattern noticeably before we move forward again. I think that can happen with depression, anxiety, fear etc, whatever it is for the individual person. Looking back I can see how I crashed backwards into frozen fear states before I was propelled outwards from them towards my running-to-escape fear state, before I began to gravitate back to some kind of balance again. But of course sometimes something can be just a bit out of balance in us at a biochemical level too without it meaning something bigger. The impetus to buy olives could be a reflection of that. I do think the foods our bodies gravitate to can be an indicator of whatever is happening for us internally. I wonder if it is the healthy fats, vitamins or antioxidants your body may be after? My food things in recent times have been sweet potato, kale, asparagus, red onion, broccoli and blueberries 😋 There’s a book called Eat Like the Animals which is about how animals instinctively know what to eat for optimal nutrition.

I did have a lovely visit with my friends who are very gentle souls. I do hope you are getting good sleep tonight and feel refreshed for your trip to town. Take care indigo and I hope you have a lovely day tomorrow 🙏☺️

Hugs,

ER

[indigo22]

Hi ER,

You may be right about the internal processing as I am a lot better this week. It was just a short down patch which I have come to accept as part of depression. It's not as bad these days as it used to be in the past so maybe I have done some healing in the meantime. How are you feeling this week, are you getting some balance back with the hormones?

I drove to get some tools that I ordered, one is a weeding tool that does a pretty good job on the Kikuyu grass in my flower beds. That stuff grows really fast and tall and has runners above and below ground so I am playing tug of war with it at present. I have decided half an hour a day of that is enough exercise, any more and I get too tired to do anything else. Usually do something else that doesn't require bending after that 😅.

Most of the foods you mentioned are my favorites too. My go to at present, to keep my gut happy, is steamed potato, cauliflower, broccoli, pumpkin, zucchini, carrot and cabbage (red or green - sometimes both) topped with some roasted garlic hummus. I really enjoy my vegies like that so it's not a sacrifice. I am a bit short on funds for the next few days so tonight I am going to make a rice penne pasta with spinach and mushrooms and a cashew based sauce, so I hope my gut doesn't complain. Not sure what it was about the olives, possibly the antioxidants or a trace mineral, but I satisfied the craving with the few I bought.

I am really looking forward to the day when I am growing my own vegies, getting creative with things that you don't find in the shops. Like purple or green cauliflower and various varieties of pumpkin and capsicum etc. I'm still doing my research at present to work out how I am going to grow everything without the use of any animal product. It's important to me that I do it the right way from the get go.

I hope you have had a lovely weekend ER.

Thinking of you,

indigo 💜

[Eagle Ray]

Dear indigo,

I'm really glad you are feeling a lot better. Your battle with the Kikuyu grass sounds similar with my ongoing battle with grass growing up in my garden beds. Does your tool have something like a prong that latches onto the runners that drags them up? I am thinking I need something like that.

Your veggies topped with roasted garlic hummus sound delicious 😋 I just ate some hummus on quinoa crisp bread a few minutes ago. Last night I made a pizza using a gluten free base and I used hummus instead of tomato paste and then added on veggies. For the first time ever I used vegan cheese which was ok. Do you ever use those products that are vegan but mimicking something else like cheese? I am not actually vegan but I'm dairy free since 2022 so it was the first pizza I'd made at home in a long time.

With your garden, seaweed fertiliser is a great option as a non-animal product. Years ago I worked in an organically run market garden and one of the people running it would create a tea from the borage plant that was then used as a liquid fertiliser. It can actually be used on the foliage of plants. The leaves of the borage are steeped like tea leaves for a few weeks. They add important nutrients like potassium and nitrogen. She grew borage plants on site for that very purpose.

I have had an incredibly emotional time with someone very close to me dying last Wednesday. It has been the most powerful grief I've experienced but incredibly healing at the same time. It's very hard to explain here, but you would likely understand as it has been a really spiritual experience. We were really connected at a soul level and his presence has been powerfully with me since he passed. I am not alone in my grief at all because he is with me. I was thinking about you and your brother who was your closest sibling and how you have felt his spirit with you. It's such a profound experience I am going through that there aren't really words that encapsulate it.

I hope you are having a really lovely week indigo.

Thinking of you too 💖

ER

[indigo22]

I'm so sorry for your loss ER,

It seems to me more than a little unfair that the ones we are most connected to are the ones that pass and leave us with a void that is difficult to fill. I hope that his presence is helping you cope with the loss, I will be here if you want to talk about it.

It was difficult with my brother because I was so young, I felt his presence but it frightened me because I didn't understand. I was not the spiritual person then that I am now, but I do think that experience with him started me on the journey along with the other experiences I have had since then. They were all different, with him it was feeling his presence in his room, I could smell him and the room felt very cold, that went on for about 6 months. With my male friend, I was 14 years older so I recorded some of the songs we used to play (him on guitar) and invited him to walk around the cemetery with me while we listened, I felt him with me and never felt the need to go back again. With my female friend it was a powerful vision in my sleep, which actually scared me again because I have never experienced anything like it. With my dad it was messages, one was a song on the radio and one was a message left on my answering machine. With my mum it has been sometimes smelling her perfume. With my older brother, I don't recall anything other than feeling his presence with me when I went outside for a cigarette a little while after I arrived at the hospital and was told he had already passed.

I don't know about you, but I have regularly asked myself what I was thinking when I planned this lifetime ‌‌😉. I have actually had a number of incites in the past couple of years that help me make sense of it all.

Your pizza sounds nice, I would not have thought to use hummus. I used to get a pizza locally with garlic oil instead of tomato paste with lots of veggies. A couple of months ago I had my first take away in four and half years, I took a chance on an Indian restaurant here and really enjoyed one of their vegan dishes. I have looked at a lot of the substitute products but I am usually put off by the list of ingredients. I do have a couple of books with recipes that sound a whole lot healthier but haven't gotten around to making them yet. I missed cheese the most when I first went vegan, but after nearly 5 years I don't often think about it anymore. I am definitely going to try one of the recipes for a cheesecake (made with cashews) one of these days, that was one of my favourite things to have.

I will send a second post shortly, went over the limit.

[indigo22]

The tool I got for the grass is called Wonder Weeder made by Cyclone. It is very much like you described. If it is of interest to you, you may have to look around for a Bunnings that still has one in stock, like I did, and then order it from your nearest store and they do a transfer. Cyclone are not making it at present and it may be going off their product list so don't waste any time trying to find one. There are possibly other tools that are somewhat similar but I like the fact that I can use it standing up with the long handle. Getting down on my knees is not part of the plan these days, I have a hard time getting up again ‌‌😅. I've managed to get a few feet cleared in the garden bed, but still more to do. I plan to soak cardboard to lay on the soil when I have finished to help stop any more from coming up and then top with bark mulch.

I am aware of seaweed and a number of other things that I can use as fertilizer, first I have heard about borage though, thank you for the tip. My problem is more what to grow them in. I have a waist height Vegepod that needs to be filled with the growing medium. Any bagged mixes either contain animal product or, if they don't, they contain man made fertilisers (yuk). So far the only options I have come up with are digging up some soil from my garden and adding a lot of things like homemade compost, perlite and sand etc. to get it draining properly and have also heard you can use coconut coir as a growing medium although I am not so sure about that on its own. Possibly mixed with everything else might be a good idea. With all this research I am doing, perhaps I will be amongst some of the successful vegan vegie garden growers ‌‌🤞.

I wish I could give you a hug, but you will have to make do with a cyber hug 🤗.

Take care of yourself and that gentle heart of yours, I will be thinking of you.

indigo 💜

[Eagle Ray]

Dear indigo,

Thank you kindly. Yes, his presence has most definitely helped me. I understand it being so hard when your brother passed as when so young it feels massive and we aren’t really equipped in this culture we live in to process death meaningfully. I feel like in some cultures children are better equipped to understand the experience of death including from a spiritual perspective. There is a sense of continuity, that it isn't a total ending and there is a sense of safety and support within a cultural framework for the experience of someone passing on. The more experience I have had of people passing, the more I have understood the connections after their passing. What I am going through now is quite profound and is a combination of grief and healing at the same time, which seems like a paradox but they are two opposites held together in a meaningful way. The person who passed is essentially the other half of my soul. We understood each other completely. We had the same strengths and vulnerabilities. So we were a mirror for each other. So his life lessons were also mine, and I am now presented with the clearest vision yet of what I need to work on in myself to heal and transform out of inherited trauma patterns. It is actually a gift despite the almost unbearable pain at times, and when that pain arises he is there to comfort me. It's kind of out of this world in terms of what I've experienced over the last couple of weeks. He came powerfully into my consciousness a few days before he passed without me initially understanding why his presence was all of a sudden so strong. I had a similar situation with an uncle just before he passed and in a similar way with him knew the exact moment death in my own body. What I am experiencing now is even more powerful. I don't know quite what each day is going to bring, but I just stay open to everything and my heart is being healed just as it also broke open.

Yes, I do miss cheese too. Not necessarily all cheese that much. But I did used to really like some of the variety of cheeses such as the freshness of bocconcini or the creaminess of brie or just the yummy melted mozzarella on a pizza. The vegan cheese is pretty expensive but I just felt inclined to give it a go the other day. It is cheese-like, but I'm aware that multiple ingredients are going into making up a product to imitate something else which does feel a bit weird and I also wonder if the multiple ingredients are actually that healthy compared to just eating whole foods in their original form. I have had cheesecake that is both vegan and gluten free and it was pretty yummy. I used to love cheesecake too, so like you I may source some recipes that I can make.

Thanks for the info about the Wonder Weeder tool. I found it is available through one store in WA. I will have a think about it. I think as you say there will be other similar tools if I didn't get that one. Homemade compost sounds like a great option for your garden. When I worked at the market garden I was given the role of raising seedlings there and I used coconut coir in the mix with other components for the seed raising mix. I can't remember the exact combo now. The coconut fibre helped with both water retention and drainage as well as aeration of the soil. With your experience you might be able to write a book about vegan gardening at the end of it!

Thank you for the hug and hugs to you too 🤗

Take care,

ER

[indigo22]

Hi ER,

The idea of twin flames comes to mind with yourself and your friend. From what I have read, twin flames are formed at the time of incarnation as two fragments of the same soul with the intention of completing the experience/lesson more quickly and completely. It also sounds a lot like this was part of the soul plan, that one would pass early when the timing was right, in order to help the other from the other side. It sounds like a very spiritual experience you are going through and I hope it will be very healing for you. I would be very interested in hearing how you came to meet each other.

I had a session with my psych yesterday and something quite profound came out of it. I realised after I made that promise to my nephew, I basically told myself that if I am to keep the promise, I need to find a way to survive. All these years later, I realise that surviving is all I have been doing, just biding my time. The part that was profound was that I decided 'I no longer want to just survive, I want to learn how to live again'. That is a huge leap for me. I have put together that statement with a photo of a dragonfly as a symbol of transformation and will print and frame to put next to my bed to remind myself each morning.

Sorry this is so short but I really wanted to touch base with you today.

Hugs,

indigo 💜