I when I first started living here in the country I started gardening everyday, saying to myself, I will just do a bit of gardening, and finding it took up all my time, so much so that I had to cheque myself because i like writing too, without talking of house work which i mostly just dont much do. I found that it made me feel good and wondered if this was not simply because of how much light I was receiving on my eyes. We must receive such a lot of light if we are outside all day. In prehistoric times we must have spent a long time outside, normally.
As I write now, I am listening again to Monty Dons voice and it makes me think that maybe it is his voice talking to you here about depression that I remembered when i listenrd to Johan Hari, which made me think Monty Don needs to talk of depression more. Please pass this on to him. Also if you dont know him already, please, please listen to Johan Hari: he is on you tube. I think you would like his lecture a lot. For you, what he says maybe all terribly well known.
I have been studying Ramiros videos. As I wanted to talk to you about it I started to ask myself what the different yoga exercises were about in more detail than I had when i was in his classes and so I have more to say on the subject. . Ramiro Calle seems to think, that for people with troubles, totaly safe is hatha yoga ad relaxing. However, he says that lots of people do different types of hatha yoga and he does not consider all of these equaly for the good spiritual or healthy psychological purposes that is real yoguis point, or for knowing your body. ¨Living your coporality¨, he says: I reckon that the body is a memory palace and so, as you exerecise your body you might touch lightly on memories and traumas without getting too overwhelmed by them. Also we feel with our bodies, cry with our eyes and gasp when we cry, get skin tension as a result of mental problems, etc. This means feeling our body is also feeling our emotions, at a light level as we are excercising and not actual at that moment full of some strong emotion: This is also me not him. Of course books on such exercises say that any difficulty in doing an excercise, any refusal of muscles to relax and stretch further, comes from some sort of mental blockage. SOmetimes we are doing it a bit wrong too. I danced with a womoa a week ago and she certainly had enormous´ tension in her shouldiers: Knotted I thought. I have just watched a vdeo of him doing hatha yoga. It seemed to me a good one. the m¡name is below......... Ramiro Calle_ Yoga and Mental health. epic sport. The people who published it are called, epic sport I thiink that holding a pose for a good half minute or some such, has to do with strretching and so by relaxing the stretched muscles, as you can read about in stretching excercises, but also maybe hsa to do with feeling you body, living it, your coporality. As sretching works like a massage relaxing the muscles, and also the lying down for some thirty seconds after each exercise is also relaxing, relaxing students after a session of Hatha Yoga is easier than it is in other circumstances: They are already somewhat relaxed. A trick of martial artsteachers and yogui types, is to leave the students waiting a bit before the class, so that they start to drop their daily anxieties before the class begins. Before the tea ceremony the visiting participants are left to wait in something in the garden that looks like a bus stop for a while before coming into the tea house. Another trick is to say that many people are bad at concentrating, then the students think, Öf course I am good at concentrating¨; and sit up and make an effort. Ramiro did it ocasionally at the begining of ths clases especially with new students and I also saw it used in a marcial arts class recorded on television Typical of Ramiro is saying .Forget that your daughter broke a ming vase, your relationship with your daughter is more important than the ming vase MIng vase is my over the top example, instead of plate or some such. You said something of the sort in a video I saw a few weeks ago. You have then, got yourself a guru!
I want to say to Monty Dn, after watching Johan Hari´s lecture on dpression , which talks of community togetherness and it usefullness for depression as people start to work together, which somehow made me think of Monty Don again, who i had seen looking a bit low and to say to him, that good as gardens are for mental health, I think maybe he would enjoy talking more about depression which is less frivolous. Gardening is not frivolous but depression is even more serious in a way or he has not addressed it as much. I thought it would lift his spirits.
It may take a very long time to meditate well but after a little bit of meditation, you start to feel very energetic after meditation and minded to go out and see, at any rate your local shop keepers. I at least did. I meditated in the morning when there was not much social life to be had. However i think that the people who get deeper into mediation sooner might be those who are more used to concentrating on something boring.
Thinking about energies again, .In this case about energies and gardening. In Marcial Arts, I think I connect mindfulness with the Marcial Arts and not with meditationn, concentrating on what you are doing, intelligently rubbing the surface of the dirt on your table not aiming to rub deep, so sort of rubbing the top off you wood say, is one aspect of mindfulness. The other part of beign mindful when you are doing somethign, killing your enemy for example, is your own energies, noticing how are you feeling or in looking for that equilibrium Miyagi in Karate Kid talks about, maybe a quietness of mood. In AIkido, getting your butterflies or chi, to stick some two inches below you tummy button but nearer the spine, so as to keep them inplace. Butterflies, my own contribution. So in gardening whatching your own mood as well as your attention helping you to plant the plant with least waste of energy. Lao Tsze says, roughly, do what you feel like, not meaning what you think amusing but what your bodily state suggests is necessary, rest or activity. Dont push yourself to do what you dont feel your body needs. I have to walk the dogs now which is not what my body needs at all. My butterflies are always in the wrong place, in my soalr plexus or else floating around my chest, rib cage. They were in the right place however when I went to yoga class and what a lot of energy that gave me. I dont know if butterflies has anyhting to do with energies. Lao Tsze says do what you feel like, not meaning what you think amusing but what your bodily state suggests is necessary, rest or activity. Dont push yourself to do what you dont feel your bosy needs. I have to walk the dogs nowm which is not what my body needs at all.
Meditation is so much more than what you have mentioned here. The Indian Saddhus who whatch their breathing and other psysomatic reactions to every situation become able to wind down, not just themselves but also other people. There are lot of differrent meditations that do so may different things. THe I ndian holy woman who hugs people maybe can, by so doing, get people to relax enough to feel themselves, I don´t know exactly what she does but if it relaxing them , well then they would feel their pain or exhaustion, it seems to me that we tense up on psychological pain as well as physical pain, which somehow makes such things as psychological pain hard to feel so you dont morn for what ever give, time to it as you should. As a yogi she would also know how to transmite her own calm. I think these stories of learnign to help others make learning meditation so much more interesting and inspireing to learn. I love you for trying to make Islam more availiable to us and so to knit different bits of English community. In a tea ceremony it is probably communion that is what they are looking for. A good tea master would be looking for. Making people wait as they do in the bus stop like place is a technic o f teachers who teach meditaional type acrtivities. THe idea is to get them to calm down a bit and drop the activities that they have had previous to the te ceremony or what ever. HTeir worry about arriving on time for instance. The tea masters are also, most likely teaching civil comunication in which people dare to express themselves, an act of teaching your dinner party manners to all.
Monty Don says he has difficulty meditating. Is not this because he does not do it right. In meditation the meditation was described by my teacher as a support, you dont just stop thinking as many seem to think, go into a dream, you concentrate on your breathing, which changes continuously or on a spot say, with which support your job is to concentrate on whether or not your mind has wandered and to bring it back to the spot, this kept me very busy, especially at first. Probably I have said this already. As you know Ramiro now I believe, if so my hellish Catholic sister who is a sort of Catholic witch guru, will try to get in touch with you to blacken him, you know more about his meditations than I do.
I think my mothers ideas on people might be good for people with issues: She was always excusing poeple, not us, she was demanding of her own children but from other families because their parents had brought them up selfish, what can you expect after their education or because they had some problem or other so they would lack confidence and walk out or whatever. Would say for example that their parents were not very nice to them, so they had not learnt about niceness: or say that they are shy etc. Mary Trump explains how Trump Dad made an example of her father, Trump's elder brother, calling him stupid for being soft enough to be kind to others, for being weak and so not hard and masculine and firm enough etc, so letting Donald Trump know that he would be seen as weak and stupid and very despised, as was his brother if he was friendly or nice: I think that learning that others, for one reason or another, did not have the background that allowed them to be really good friends or family members might help people with some issues htey have because other did not behave right. My mother was not always perfect herself though mostly very comprensive and forgiving: Her father left home when she was a child and she blamed her mother for it, and did not see her mother much but loved seeing her father, though that did not happen too often either and later on in my childhood her father who never visited us in London, rang up to say he had left two peasants, two weeks ago at his club in London, in a passage and maybe we would like to pick them up and eat them, which my father did. In those days we used to eat pheasants two weeks after shooting them in my grandmothers farm but hung in a cold cellar not a warm club passage way: My father got me to pluck them but there was not much one could use on them: The thing is, should not my father have rung my Grandfather and had it out with him for having a place to stay in London, he lived in the Isle of Wight and even so not visiting us if he was there. My mother adored her father: My mother did not say anything about her fathers meaness either, she was very generous and forgiving with most but maybe she should have have been cross with him then herself. He might have felt guilty about leaving the children in the war and have been better off for being told off for never visiting, Have then felt that they wanted him. Her brother and her. Some are not brought up to have out what they should have out with others: I dont think I was either.
WIllem Kuyken, I talked to you about my yoga teacher Ramiro Calle, I know Catholics who blacken him as hard as they can, they do their best to say that he hypnotises peole which is rich coming from Catholics, who do so very weird stuff. Their extreme shriving methods become coercion for example. He is a very straight person and not interested in forming any sort of sect and though he might suggest certain activities, to me, spending more time studying Spanish as well as meditation, he never, as Catholics do insists on one following his suggestions My once extreme enthusiasm for what he teaches worried him, for example. Catholics blacken absolutely any religion or religious influence which is not their own, which is to say commite many, indeed thousands of acts of omission when they talk of such: They talk of things that can be made to look bad about other religions and try their best to stop the good getting through. Catholic is my cradle religiion. I have known them through from being taught about Jesu as achild and pre teen, to my thirties when they considered me mature enough to be taught some sort of supposedly more mature and much more violent ideology, to do with making people do what theChurch sees as the best, with verbal abuse disguised as shriving them. I also went to protestant schools which gave me a slightly different point of veiw to add to the Catholic one. s
I have an indian friend kapil Jariwala and he says that you meditat in iIndia because there are so many people there that it is the only way to get a bit of peace.
Monty Don mentions tense anxious people. I have heard that psychologists who work in Dublin with PTS patients, start to have tense anxious sensations, all sorts of physical, psycho somatic feelings that they feel come from their patients. They feel that the patients feelings are getting into the psychiatrists or psychoanalists. So maybe if you dealt with post traumatic stress disorder, with soldiers coming back from war, you would be tense whether you had a garden or not, though mindfulllness can help you to deal with such people. A friend of mine said that they meditate in India because it was the only way to be alone for a while. Also in an epsidod of MOnty Dons gardening things a chinese commentater on rocks in the garden in China said that you have to think about what repulses you in the stone, as well as what you like about the stones in their garden. Is not that healthier for depression that trying to see the beauty in everything. Trying to be beautiful noble etc.. which is demanding and stressful. Is mindfullness always about the surroundings or is it about feeling what you yourself are feeling as you dig or whatever.I think tha tthinking about your own feelings is a big part of it. I think you should not be trying to find anything good, but to you feel your own sensations, then you build up knowledge about your own feelings and maybe of how to calm yourself down. I think that any sort of exigence, effort to find things of worth and meaning instead of simple acceptance increases depression. A Buddhist comes to people with an empty bowl. They should have no expectations, such might colour their vision, their ability to see what had really been presented to them. The sea is relaxing because it is so much bigger than we are that it takes away the onus of doing thingsm of changing the whole world, not that you are not meant to do your best but if you look at the sea, you know that you cannot be totally responsible for everything. Remember I found immense tension at the bottom of my depression jwhen i meditated when a ibt depressed, so maybe the answer to try not to be getting enthused and to find beauty etc..to do things. the answer is with putting down your load in as far as that is to want too much to to be too good at things. I have a sister in a Catholic sect in some way related to the Legion of Christ, who is very troubling to be with. Mind you I think that most of her behaviour is o¡driven by the sect and so of the Inquisitional sort, they wish to mess up people who like mediation, say or who are divorced, so she is verbaly abusive in no small way means others to feel ill and doe sall she can to make them feel terrible, so I cannot see what part of the feelings that are the result of her company, have to do with a wish on her part to make me uncomfortable and what part has to do with receiving the feelings of somone who is, in a way obliged to be nasty so continually as a result of the demands of her vocation and so is a person who has become very disturbed. I was taught meditation by Ramiro Calle, Spains great adventurer in India and into the mind.
I htink tha a lot of thee practices of AA if people dont start to totally pull each ohter to pieces, it seems to me that different groups are more or less good, I accompanied a man to these meetings.are very good for amplifying peoples charity to others and kindness, understandingand so I have thoguht that you could have married peoples problems AA, then an awful lot of peole could be brought into AAs useful interaction on human behaviour. A lot of my knowqledge on this comes from the sit com, Mom.
Monty Don, in winter the flower buds grow and fatten on my trees i like fruit trees and the catkins on hazels are so beautiful and th etrwigs on trees seem to me to grow and on many trees get colourful on willows for example, it is such a mistake to prefer oaks and such to smaller trees. YOu are jus thibernating and dont see it.
Even with physical pain, lying down and concentreating on it reduces it, concentrating on your whole body and the pain. We normally o i normally try to distract omyselves from pain while tensing up round the focal `point of pain.. If you face the pain then your mind which is more able than you know, deals with the problem. After all sometimes people who are wounded dont feel the wound for sometime, our body does produce painkillers. Ia that what you mean by mindfullness? Centering on your own feelings in your own body? Ordinary meditation works on the unconscious without your conscious being conscious that you are doing so, if my teacher is right. It is a question of cutting off normal thought patterns by concentrating on something small and so not thinking of your normal worries, so that the brain can work on hte persons own problems without peoples daily worries coming inbetween it and more global realities. I am not really as badly off as my fears make me feel I am, for example. Most meditation is the brain being treated like a computer that can sort out things if you let it go and stop nudging it to take the habitual roads your conscious mind thinks it should take. Some meditations have a a more specific job. My teacher once said that meditating on the jewel of a loved one helps you with your feelings on that person. He was talking about a person whose mother had died, but you should not I think, be noticing your emotions in this sort of meditation, you should just think of the ring and letting your unconscious mind sort things out. So, not like mindfulness, if I understand mindfullness right. Is mindfulness a Zen meditation? The first meditational exercise my teacher taught was to just notice as the thoughts entered your head but not to hold on to the thoughts, to let them go as they are followed by another thought, which it seems to me to be a way of training the person to notice the entering thoughts, something that later helps you when you have to get rid of such in the meditation in which you center you mind on a spot, you have to hunt down entering ideas and return to the spot. THis meditation on a spot is meant to increase a persons determination, apart from bringing you down to the part of you that is always calm. I was taught that the thing is to turn off from yourself so that your unconscious mind, though i dont know that the word unconscious was used, just mind, can deal with your problems. You might not consciously understand yourself after all. as well as it being necessary to shut down a whole lot daily worries that blur the bigger picture of your here and now. On the subject of different bits of your mind, a book called, ¨Drawing on the right Side of the Brain¨, is useful.´Written by Betty Edwards, She says that life drawing is a right brain activity, so left hand activity, and so, she says that you need to say to yourself, I am cutting out my own verbage for a while but dont worry you should add, you can talk later on. The verbage being a left brain, right hand activity it intefers with a right brain activities. We are so constantly verbal that we find it hard to cut out on our worries and normal reactions to things, so that to cut out verbage is very uncomfortable, we want to go on rationalising and gabbing, thinking so as to concentrate just observing the angle of the lines, a cold sort of activity that is more useful is more useful in a realistic drawing than our normmal reactions to a person are. I graduated in art and there studied in the life drawing studio, which followed the school of pianting of Tonks and Lavery and such at the Slade, a school of painting that produced such famous painters as Anthony Lopez and Uan Uglow and Craigie Aitchesen. The thing about life drawing is that normaly we seek to notice charicteristc traits of a person so as to to recognise them and to go on recognising that funny nose which allows us to recognise the person and so is what we want to talk about, but cannot really see well from every angle from ever angle and every lighting situation. Really we would like to draw that nose from the side as the Egyptians do, which does not work for portrait painting. That we want to paint the nose as we know it is so strong a desire that painting it as it looks front on with a front on light, that stops us seeing the charicteristic curves is impossible without a lot of training. Studies on people with lobotomies show how different sides of the brain work and are mentioned in the book. I suppose this cutting off of the verbal part of the mind, that is normal in many meditational practices is the sort of thing a neurologist would be most likely to understand. I think both mindfullness and the other discipline of meditation which is the opposite, it is cutting of the verbage and what you are feeling now, so as to allow things you are not conscious of to flower, the part of the brain that does not lose itself in todays feelings but keeps things more global maybe, would both really work for depressives. In a way Hindu holy men, Saddhus and such are scientists, they have spent their lives noticing every phsyologiacal reaction in their bodies to emotions and actions, day in day out, becoming mendicants so as to be able to exclude other activies.They are the microscope, stethoscop etc., observing their ownselves. Buddha left his palace to do that sort of thing. They have milenario knowledge of different meditaitons and how these effect themselves and others. We just find it so hard to think other cultures have anything rocket sciency to teach us and microbioma in the soil which Monty Don Talks about as he talks about compost, is cutting edge science today wth new discoveries about the suymbiotic relationships between microbioma etc and plants being found daily.
Monty Don and the others present, it seems to me that there are other eastern concepts that might help depressives, people with July sad. What about Chi. Do you whatch Kung Fu Panda, his chi gets knocked and his young pupils get together aound him to refill it.We hear of lots of eastern technic in cartoons. I read a book on AIkido and in Aikido you dont send your energy to the arm tha tis going to give the blow as you do in some other marcial arts, you keep it in that point an inch below your belly button but nearer your backbone. probably the centrre od balance. I take that to mean your feeling of having butterflies in your chest should be lowered to the stomach area were it does not feel half so butterflyey. WHen his students have learnt to keep their Chi in the right place and he can take students to an icey river and get them to dip in it without getting the shivers! The writer of the book seemed to consider a woman, who said she did not know what Chi was, as a person who was mischeivoulsy messing with him. I dont think it is easy for us European to understand about Chi. The other, similar thing but Hindu is your Chakras. That t hings should satisfy your stomach, heart and head is one part of Chakras. I think when an Islamist salute is to touch theiir heart, lips and forehead that is somewhat like Chakras, If I touch my heart, lips and forhead. If i press my hand to my heart lips and forehead. If you are being messed with your chakras go to pot in a big way , mine do and I get filled with swirly feelings. Noticing your Chakras or your Chi might be one way of noticing that you need to pull your self back into some sort of equilibrium instead of just carrying on till you feel that the ice is geting very thin. My sister, in the Legion of Christ, brain washes or tries to, people, and my chakras and chi go very wizzy as a result of the force of her mischievous power of prayer. If I sit whatching people on telly, I love people in some ways, appreciating them and trying to understand them, that brings my chi back into shape a bit, as also does company.
My experience in life is that I used to think people had humours, were shy or choloric or phegmatic, as in a Shakespeare play and what I found out in life was that your apparently shy person in fact despises talk and extrovet behaviour and their parents have taught them to despise such things. They might be taught that men dont talk, for example, unless strictly for practicle reasons. I have come to think that if you want to know what is their `problem you need to converse with them a lot. Om this subject Jesus´s question on turning the other cheek is a very important one. So many people in fact have the idea that if someone stands on their foot, they will hang draw and quarter them. A mafia type veiw, born of a somewhat ferocious idea of how you gain respect, not by beign noble it seems or knowledgable, is an idea that maybe needs to be argued with by a psychologist but people dont usually admit to havign such an attitude so you need to talk an awful lot at least to get the whole picture. You can have the same religion and come form the same street and have very different ideas on such an impòrtant point. After yoga I decided to help and decided to talk to tramps and just talking lets you know a lot about others. Those with mental problems real ones probably just really need to be with somone who is friendly. More on my experience with the homeless. Saddhus, Hindu holy men who dedicate their whole life to observing their respiration and the changes in it and what caused such, it seems can positively effect the mood of people around them.they are not just turning themselves into laboratory rats This ability could be useful if you are looking after the mentally ill. My Yoga teacher Ramiro Calle actual knew some such holy men. I have sat next to such homeless as were mad trying to just be with them in bad moments and also trying to notice their mood. Apparently those who do massages try to get their breathing in line with the person they are massaging´s breathing. So they do try to get into the same mood as their patients. an indian woman massage with a television chef., an italian one, engded up just pouring a stream of oil on his head, apparently one indian technic, all other masssages beign too much for him. As to being with autists who do little normal intercommunication, the idea of sharing their mood instead of words or glances might give people a way to be with them. I was with an autist child and he was making merry whoops, we were in the garden, so I did too and even tried ringing the changes, returning two whoops to his one sound. I kept in the same humour as him though. He did follow me on the two whoops thing. Had he been sad, I would have made sounds in a sad mood myself I think, though in that case I might have tried to ring changes on his mood, not on the number of sounds he made. I think meditation, which is boring, at least superficially so, helps people to be with people who are not behaving in a very interactive manner. it helps people to sit and undertake what at first glance seem to be more boring tasks.
Monty Don. You said that depression is negarive, an absence of experience. My memory of it was of an absence of desire to do things, you say an absence of relationship as well as an abcense if experience, i would add, Sylvia Plaths ¨Bell Jar¨the muted world of being in a jar. Then you said you actively alientaed people you love which a sister of mine is doing but she is not depressed unless it is chronically so, so I have a reason to be interested in this bit of what you say but can you, when depressed want anything enough to take action on something? Do you then really want to alienate people because you call this alienation active? I want to know more about this. You say, you (actively) do everything you can to stop it for an number of reasons and the placing of this sentence makes it hard to see if it was going to be about stopping friends or your depression, of couse you would want to stop the depression. Do you feel some sort of fury? Do you have desires then in depression but negative ones or is it like drug abuse, wanting to be left alone, allowed to hibernate, makes you actually aggressive to others who might want to get you out and about or do you feel agressive for other reasons. Psychiatrist sasy that sometimes men who are aggressive to their wives are really hating their mothers and my experience would make me add a mother they later in life love but at some stage hated. You say it is a destructive state of mind but I thought that was only passively so but what you say seems to hint at more. You are a man who thinks so carefully of others that it is hard to believe you are aggressive, of the problems of people who do communal gardening for example. You make an effort to clarify things for others you are generous sand hard working to be so with your knowledge. Soil science is not just about microbes it is about physics too. You need amnino acids to quellate minerals and stp chak asy beign an unswallowably big lumpof calcium for a plant and so you need soil critters to provide you with the amino acids which quellte with minerals and also also stimulate pores in plant roots to open further that normal, all of which helps with the uptake of calcium and so the production of pectine in the plants leaves, which is not a substance that mold enjoy sucking on so it impedes th growth of molds on plant leaves. More on MIcrobes are scientists finding microbes in the brain which can be responsible for mental problems. The new fangle functional doctors talk of it.
Is not concentrating on your activity, the digging your doing for example, a way to calm down? Away not to give your worries time to breath, as well as helping you to dig a hundred times better. I heard a story about a butccher who said that if you cut in the way of Zen, you never have to sharpen your knife, you never blunt it.The slowness of movements, if you are mindful is what makes such as zen people, later so good at actions, even good at attention and sensitivity to others around you. The here and now being important is also philisophical. After all, our old self is always dying, what is left of the toddler Monty? Not much. It is an arguement that is maybe meant to reduce peoples worry about death and also it is a truth, we die every minute. Our realitiy is what is happening right know not what might happen or what has happedened before, so we should look after now instead of looking after our future. If I remember right Buddha said that the only truth is change. Buddha was anxioius to stop peoples anxiety, so be ready for change and also, you have already died so often reduces is a concept that maybe peoples anxiety about dying. Another part of the here and now is. Plant things but dont be to hung up on the end result because if you are anxiety about losing your garden or plant can make you very unhappy. In the East they have been observing their reactions to everythinng for mileniums, so that they know so much about what makes us happy or unhappy or totally freaked out. So that they realise that being mindfullness as well as calming you down, makes you so much more efficient in all feilds. Is not mindfulness slow cooking and gardening? Buddha was a kings only son. I think he was worried about how to keep his people happy so he took to meditation and the here and now as the only way to that end. I try to get this writting done as fast as possible and that causes me debilitating anxiety, considerable muscular stress and ends up creating clumsyness. if I had gone slowly at first, years ago, I would now have this typing well automised and be so much better faster and calmer at it.
In Buddhism, in Buddhist meditation, your goal is very different from that given to you by the hindues that you describe here. In buddhist meditation the goal is for you to calm down untill that part of you that is your Buddhist Nature´, is where you end up. Your Buddhist Nature is one way of talking about it, another is. That part of you that in Buddhism is said to be always in you, to be your center, a place that is always calm in every storm and tha texists in every human being. Your medation in persuit of trying to get to that calm is to be given as a support that is boring, something that is really boring such as to look at a spot, the real work for the person meditating is to bring their mind back to a boring spot every time it wanders. So that you have to concentrate on catching yourself out every time your mind wanders and so arent able to think of or feel of your normal troubles. This excercise allows you to go down through different levels of yourself till you get to the calm that is always there in every storm. So. Not so much, ¨Being in the Moment¨; as getting through disturbing emotions present in your mind at the moment of meditating by the activity of keeping your mind on a candle flame or spot on the wall, untill you get to the calm that is always there. It is a exercise that will take you to where you are meant to go without you having to try to get there conciously.
Monty Don, maybe the interesting thing about your description of your muddy ugly winter garden was your guilt about not working it. Is not the garden a descrption of your own self in that season in winter and so your attitue to your garden is about your depression and so you feel guilty, very bad about not working on your self: This fits in with my feeling that an excess of personal effort causes a collapse of will,maybe, in you depressives. There is another meditation I think you might like which is to breath in thinking you are the sky and breath out thinking you are a grain of sand. another meditation which might help you is to start at the top of the head and draw a line in your head down the right side of your head, over your ear down the side of your neck, along your shoulder, down the outside of your arm to the little fingure and round the fingures of your hand till you get to and go round your thumb and then up your arm thius time on the inside of your arm to your arm pit and then down your side and then down the out side of you right leg and round each toe and back up your leg to your crutch and then on to your left leg and round the left side of your body. I think it might awake old memories as it seems to me to be possible that we use our bodies as memory palaces and so work this meditation might work gently on old traumas. A similar meditation is that of starting at the top of your head and thinking down your head and then neck and tehn body and arms and then legs.
I dont htink that any exertion, like hoping to be made happy by a flower or bird glight is useful in depression it leads ot an exertion to find something that brings hope, that is too great that leads to anxixety. So mediations that help you to calm the mind down by concentrating on something that keeps you too busy to worry, such as brining your mind back to a boring spot, so boring that you are kept busy stopping your mind from wanDering, is what is needed. Do you hear the anxiety in Monty Dons voice when he talks of all the dreams, plans and hopes for future.You can hear what an awful, terrible immense lot of anxiety such hoipes create in him. it is almost xcomic, his talking of hope and it creating anxiety. such a contardiction. He should not be dreaming of planning or anything, it worries him so. The great Sepp Holzer says that you make your plan but then you leave off thinking of it and only get done the one bit at a time that is possible. Onlly think of todays bit.
Do you get exhausted in July? Do you do all the things you do in six mounths? If you look up on you tube Cynthia Li and Mark Hyman talking about her illness, Cynthia Li is an American doctor and part of her illness was due to mercuy poisoning and part seems to have been a mood problem, maybe caused by weakness. She talks of being visited by a couple who are her friends , maybe it is the man who is and the woman, is a chinese person who exorcises her house, so odd, also says to her, that she can teach her to be aware of herself to take heed when she is tired and such. Cynthia Li as a doctor knows all about what it is to be persuaded to stay awake to work when you are tired, to learn not to notice if she is tiresd and such. Also, i find gettign upset is something i ignore, think tha ttime iwll cary me on to another mood, partly because i get upset about things that I dont consider important rationally. Small nastynesses in life seem to make me more upset thatn I give time for and maybe sitting their noticing my feeling helps and certainly feelings make me feel something like tired. If I sleep more then I get so much more done in the small amount of day left to me.
In ¡Europe we have Brother Ass, Saint Francis talks of the body as being brother ass but Saddhus observe their body as a way of knowing their emotional responses and their and humans psychological state, so that noticing your bodies feelings is a way to understand your mind. Christianity, in ways so useful as to psychology, is in some ways bad for it. Should not Ramon Cajal´s discovery of the nervous system have changed all that? the knowledge of the always present communication between mind and body.
I have another bit of knowledge on depression, that is that you should not, if you are depressed, try to find something that is wonderful enough to pull you out of it. Satisfaction in your more special work projects, project that show your worth or the best party in the world, on ht econtary, you should keep to the most boring and unglorious tasks. I just clean floors because if etc. because if I try to think of anything wonderful enough, I always decide it is not really good enough. My depressions last a few hours since I have used that technic the one of keeping things to the inglorious and boring.. MInd you, others are more disposed to depression than I am. I got depressed when I was getting close to twenty years old and in my early twenties and decided that, in childhood you just do what you are told to do, what your parents organise for you and as you get older you start to try to think of a wonderful activity, one that will make you feel good and that that is disasterous. Just do something really boring. Emmerson, the poet said that in the mud and filth of things something always shines. If you want something to shine don¨t look sunwards, look at the mud and filth. Also. I once, later in life when i had lea¡rnt how to meditate, when i felt depressed one morning, decided to meditate and found out that what seemed like a lack of emotion, curiosity and desire for activity, was really a greatish tension. My natural feeling was that when i was depressed it was because I was too relaxed , but by meditating I found I was pretty tense. Interesting, what? I once bought a book by Jung, I think it was, on libido and in the part of it i read, the conclusion of those discussing libido was that it was curiosity. In life I suppose. Another thought on depression of mine is, that you should find things to do in the garden in autumn. I find a lot to do there in iautumn and winter but then I have a lot of wilderness to tame, brambles to cut and a lot of trees to plant. When I first came to live in the country. i meant to to do some gardening, not to much but found that I was gardening all the time and was happy. Is light so important that it is not your moral health, your caring for others as the religious would have it or your emotional health that matters. Not the people around you, just the fact that you are outside in the light for hours. Like a cave man was I suppose. I do so hope these letters get through to Monty Don.
I am sorry when i first started to write I had just listened ot monty don or nearly so so I had not heard the exercise Willem Kuyken gave. Weeds are plants and whats more their is nothing prettier than grass seed heads and even the empty seed heads and the same goes for the seed heads of other weeds whoe flowers are spindly and uninspiring.
A garden is sybolic of your care of your mind and your attitudes and you say tha tin winter your garden is a mess which is terrible. By the by, in a Tea House you sometimes get an inner garden and outer. one to be seen from beyonf the inner fence. You have symboli things in the inner garden like a sink and tap to give you drinking water and allow you to clean up a bit. Also a compost pit. and a fence, the fance whoswe sybolism is that a garden is a human thing that is separeted from the wild beyond. Is the inner garden tha ttabernacle? A tea house is about the humble and villagey but then they have got a bit too artistic and interestd in patina, and such, there is even the possibility of carelessly chucking into you compost pit a geranium or two when guests arrive so absolutely getting rid of the humble and earthy. humas will go towards the shee she, I am studying hte tea house for you. Age and patiuna chiipped edges are called Sabi, pronounced in english, sobby and is a principle of your tea house, a place that looks lived in and not new, the old and wrinkled, The principle of Wabi sabi is pat of a tea house. Wabi is pronounced in English wobbly and is the principle of things being inperfect unbalanced, not your Leonardos perfect proportioned man but your Rembrandts absolutly cute but inprerfect woman in the river. Not your transcendenlty but your messy humanity that you have to love that way. Long live wobbly, sobby I say.
I when I first started living here in the country I started gardening everyday, saying to myself, I will just do a bit of gardening, and finding it took up all my time, so much so that I had to cheque myself because i like writing too, without talking of house work which i mostly just dont much do. I found that it made me feel good and wondered if this was not simply because of how much light I was receiving on my eyes. We must receive such a lot of light if we are outside all day.
In prehistoric times we must have spent a long time outside, normally.
What a lovely guest Monty is. Such a kind and caring sort.
As I write now, I am listening again to Monty Dons voice and it makes me think that maybe it is his voice talking to you here about depression that I remembered when i listenrd to Johan Hari, which made me think Monty Don needs to talk of depression more. Please pass this on to him.
Also if you dont know him already, please, please listen to Johan Hari: he is on you tube. I think you would like his lecture a lot. For you, what he says maybe all terribly well known.
I have been studying Ramiros videos. As I wanted to talk to you about it I started to ask myself what the different yoga exercises were about in more detail than I had when i was in his classes and so I have more to say on the subject. .
Ramiro Calle seems to think, that for people with troubles, totaly safe is hatha yoga ad relaxing. However, he says that lots of people do different types of hatha yoga and he does not consider all of these equaly for the good spiritual or healthy psychological purposes that is real yoguis point, or for knowing your body. ¨Living your coporality¨, he says:
I reckon that the body is a memory palace and so, as you exerecise your body you might touch lightly on memories and traumas without getting too overwhelmed by them. Also we feel with our bodies, cry with our eyes and gasp when we cry, get skin tension as a result of mental problems, etc. This means feeling our body is also feeling our emotions, at a light level as we are excercising and not actual at that moment full of some strong emotion: This is also me not him.
Of course books on such exercises say that any difficulty in doing an excercise, any refusal of muscles to relax and stretch further, comes from some sort of mental blockage. SOmetimes we are doing it a bit wrong too.
I danced with a womoa a week ago and she certainly had enormous´ tension in her shouldiers: Knotted I thought.
I have just watched a vdeo of him doing hatha yoga. It seemed to me a good one. the m¡name is below.........
Ramiro Calle_ Yoga and Mental health. epic sport. The people who published it are called, epic sport
I thiink that holding a pose for a good half minute or some such, has to do with strretching and so by relaxing the stretched muscles, as you can read about in stretching excercises, but also maybe hsa to do with feeling you body, living it, your coporality.
As sretching works like a massage relaxing the muscles, and also the lying down for some thirty seconds after each exercise is also relaxing, relaxing students after a session of Hatha Yoga is easier than it is in other circumstances: They are already somewhat relaxed.
A trick of martial artsteachers and yogui types, is to leave the students waiting a bit before the class, so that they start to drop their daily anxieties before the class begins. Before the tea ceremony the visiting participants are left to wait in something in the garden that looks like a bus stop for a while before coming into the tea house.
Another trick is to say that many people are bad at concentrating, then the students think, Öf course I am good at concentrating¨; and sit up and make an effort. Ramiro did it ocasionally at the begining of ths clases especially with new students and I also saw it used in a marcial arts class recorded on television
Typical of Ramiro is saying .Forget that your daughter broke a ming vase, your relationship with your daughter is more important than the ming vase MIng vase is my over the top example, instead of plate or some such. You said something of the sort in a video I saw a few weeks ago. You have then, got yourself a guru!
ONG what a great conversation
Virtual Psychiatry, excellent.
I want to say to Monty Dn, after watching Johan Hari´s lecture on dpression , which talks of community togetherness and it usefullness for depression as people start to work together, which somehow made me think of Monty Don again, who i had seen looking a bit low and to say to him, that good as gardens are for mental health, I think maybe he would enjoy talking more about depression which is less frivolous. Gardening is not frivolous but depression is even more serious in a way or he has not addressed it as much. I thought it would lift his spirits.
It may take a very long time to meditate well but after a little bit of meditation, you start to feel very energetic after meditation and minded to go out and see, at any rate your local shop keepers. I at least did. I meditated in the morning when there was not much social life to be had.
However i think that the people who get deeper into mediation sooner might be those who are more used to concentrating on something boring.
Thinking about energies again, .In this case about energies and gardening.
In Marcial Arts, I think I connect mindfulness with the Marcial Arts and not with meditationn, concentrating on what you are doing, intelligently rubbing the surface of the dirt on your table not aiming to rub deep, so sort of rubbing the top off you wood say, is one aspect of mindfulness. The other part of beign mindful when you are doing somethign, killing your enemy for example, is your own energies, noticing how are you feeling or in looking for that equilibrium Miyagi in Karate Kid talks about, maybe a quietness of mood. In AIkido, getting your butterflies or chi, to stick some two inches below you tummy button but nearer the spine, so as to keep them inplace. Butterflies, my own contribution. So in gardening whatching your own mood as well as your attention helping you to plant the plant with least waste of energy.
Lao Tsze says, roughly, do what you feel like, not meaning what you think amusing but what your bodily state suggests is necessary, rest or activity. Dont push yourself to do what you dont feel your body needs. I have to walk the dogs now which is not what my body needs at all.
My butterflies are always in the wrong place, in my soalr plexus or else floating around my chest, rib cage. They were in the right place however when I went to yoga class and what a lot of energy that gave me. I dont know if butterflies has anyhting to do with energies.
Lao Tsze says do what you feel like, not meaning what you think amusing but what your bodily state suggests is necessary, rest or activity. Dont push yourself to do what you dont feel your bosy needs. I have to walk the dogs nowm which is not what my body needs at all.
Meditation is so much more than what you have mentioned here. The Indian Saddhus who whatch their breathing and other psysomatic reactions to every situation become able to wind down, not just themselves but also other people. There are lot of differrent meditations that do so may different things.
THe I ndian holy woman who hugs people maybe can, by so doing, get people to relax enough to feel themselves, I don´t know exactly what she does but if it relaxing them , well then they would feel their pain or exhaustion, it seems to me that we tense up on psychological pain as well as physical pain, which somehow makes such things as psychological pain hard to feel so you dont morn for what ever give, time to it as you should.
As a yogi she would also know how to transmite her own calm. I think these stories of learnign to help others make learning meditation so much more interesting and inspireing to learn.
I love you for trying to make Islam more availiable to us and so to knit different bits of English community.
In a tea ceremony it is probably communion that is what they are looking for. A good tea master would be looking for. Making people wait as they do in the bus stop like place is a technic o f teachers who teach meditaional type acrtivities. THe idea is to get them to calm down a bit and drop the activities that they have had previous to the te ceremony or what ever. HTeir worry about arriving on time for instance.
The tea masters are also, most likely teaching civil comunication in which people dare to express themselves, an act of teaching your dinner party manners to all.
Monty Don says he has difficulty meditating. Is not this because he does not do it right. In meditation the meditation was described by my teacher as a support, you dont just stop thinking as many seem to think, go into a dream, you concentrate on your breathing, which changes continuously or on a spot say, with which support your job is to concentrate on whether or not your mind has wandered and to bring it back to the spot, this kept me very busy, especially at first. Probably I have said this already.
As you know Ramiro now I believe, if so my hellish Catholic sister who is a sort of Catholic witch guru, will try to get in touch with you to blacken him, you know more about his meditations than I do.
I think my mothers ideas on people might be good for people with issues: She was always excusing poeple, not us, she was demanding of her own children but from other families because their parents had brought them up selfish, what can you expect after their education or because they had some problem or other so they would lack confidence and walk out or whatever. Would say for example that their parents were not very nice to them, so they had not learnt about niceness: or say that they are shy etc.
Mary Trump explains how Trump Dad made an example of her father, Trump's elder brother, calling him stupid for being soft enough to be kind to others, for being weak and so not hard and masculine and firm enough etc, so letting Donald Trump know that he would be seen as weak and stupid and very despised, as was his brother if he was friendly or nice:
I think that learning that others, for one reason or another, did not have the background that allowed them to be really good friends or family members might help people with some issues htey have because other did not behave right.
My mother was not always perfect herself though mostly very comprensive and forgiving: Her father left home when she was a child and she blamed her mother for it, and did not see her mother much but loved seeing her father, though that did not happen too often either and later on in my childhood her father who never visited us in London, rang up to say he had left two peasants, two weeks ago at his club in London, in a passage and maybe we would like to pick them up and eat them, which my father did. In those days we used to eat pheasants two weeks after shooting them in my grandmothers farm but hung in a cold cellar not a warm club passage way: My father got me to pluck them but there was not much one could use on them:
The thing is, should not my father have rung my Grandfather and had it out with him for having a place to stay in London, he lived in the Isle of Wight and even so not visiting us if he was there. My mother adored her father: My mother did not say anything about her fathers meaness either, she was very generous and forgiving with most but maybe she should have have been cross with him then herself. He might have felt guilty about leaving the children in the war and have been better off for being told off for never visiting, Have then felt that they wanted him. Her brother and her. Some are not brought up to have out what they should have out with others: I dont think I was either.
WIllem Kuyken, I talked to you about my yoga teacher Ramiro Calle, I know Catholics who blacken him as hard as they can, they do their best to say that he hypnotises peole which is rich coming from Catholics, who do so very weird stuff. Their extreme shriving methods become coercion for example.
He is a very straight person and not interested in forming any sort of sect and though he might suggest certain activities, to me, spending more time studying Spanish as well as meditation, he never, as Catholics do insists on one following his suggestions My once extreme enthusiasm for what he teaches worried him, for example.
Catholics blacken absolutely any religion or religious influence which is not their own, which is to say commite many, indeed thousands of acts of omission when they talk of such: They talk of things that can be made to look bad about other religions and try their best to stop the good getting through.
Catholic is my cradle religiion. I have known them through from being taught about Jesu as achild and pre teen, to my thirties when they considered me mature enough to be taught some sort of supposedly more mature and much more violent ideology, to do with making people do what theChurch sees as the best, with verbal abuse disguised as shriving them. I also went to protestant schools which gave me a slightly different point of veiw to add to the Catholic one.
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I have an indian friend kapil Jariwala and he says that you meditat in iIndia because there are so many people there that it is the only way to get a bit of peace.
Monty Don mentions tense anxious people. I have heard that psychologists who work in Dublin with PTS patients, start to have tense anxious sensations, all sorts of physical, psycho somatic feelings that they feel come from their patients.
They feel that the patients feelings are getting into the psychiatrists or psychoanalists. So maybe if you dealt with post traumatic stress disorder, with soldiers coming back from war, you would be tense whether you had a garden or not, though mindfulllness can help you to deal with such people.
A friend of mine said that they meditate in India because it was the only way to be alone for a while. Also in an epsidod of MOnty Dons gardening things a chinese commentater on rocks in the garden in China said that you have to think about what repulses you in the stone, as well as what you like about the stones in their garden. Is not that healthier for depression that trying to see the beauty in everything. Trying to be beautiful noble etc.. which is demanding and stressful.
Is mindfullness always about the surroundings or is it about feeling what you yourself are feeling as you dig or whatever.I think tha tthinking about your own feelings is a big part of it. I think you should not be trying to find anything good, but to you feel your own sensations, then you build up knowledge about your own feelings and maybe of how to calm yourself down. I think that any sort of exigence, effort to find things of worth and meaning instead of simple acceptance increases depression. A Buddhist comes to people with an empty bowl. They should have no expectations, such might colour their vision, their ability to see what had really been presented to them.
The sea is relaxing because it is so much bigger than we are that it takes away the onus of doing thingsm of changing the whole world, not that you are not meant to do your best but if you look at the sea, you know that you cannot be totally responsible for everything. Remember I found immense tension at the bottom of my depression jwhen i meditated when a ibt depressed, so maybe the answer to try not to be getting enthused and to find beauty etc..to do things. the answer is with putting down your load in as far as that is to want too much to to be too good at things.
I have a sister in a Catholic sect in some way related to the Legion of Christ, who is very troubling to be with. Mind you I think that most of her behaviour is o¡driven by the sect and so of the Inquisitional sort, they wish to mess up people who like mediation, say or who are divorced, so she is verbaly abusive in no small way means others to feel ill and doe sall she can to make them feel terrible, so I cannot see what part of the feelings that are the result of her company, have to do with a wish on her part to make me uncomfortable and what part has to do with receiving the feelings of somone who is, in a way obliged to be nasty so continually as a result of the demands of her vocation and so is a person who has become very disturbed.
I was taught meditation by Ramiro Calle, Spains great adventurer in India and into the mind.
I htink tha a lot of thee practices of AA if people dont start to totally pull each ohter to pieces, it seems to me that different groups are more or less good, I accompanied a man to these meetings.are very good for amplifying peoples charity to others and kindness, understandingand so I have thoguht that you could have married peoples problems AA, then an awful lot of peole could be brought into AAs useful interaction on human behaviour. A lot of my knowqledge on this comes from the sit com, Mom.
Monty Don, in winter the flower buds grow and fatten on my trees i like fruit trees and the catkins on hazels are so beautiful and th etrwigs on trees seem to me to grow and on many trees get colourful on willows for example, it is such a mistake to prefer oaks and such to smaller trees. YOu are jus thibernating and dont see it.
Even with physical pain, lying down and concentreating on it reduces it, concentrating on your whole body and the pain. We normally o i normally try to distract omyselves from pain while tensing up round the focal `point of pain.. If you face the pain then your mind which is more able than you know, deals with the problem. After all sometimes people who are wounded dont feel the wound for sometime, our body does produce painkillers.
Ia that what you mean by mindfullness? Centering on your own feelings in your own body? Ordinary meditation works on the unconscious without your conscious being conscious that you are doing so, if my teacher is right. It is a question of cutting off normal thought patterns by concentrating on something small and so not thinking of your normal worries, so that the brain can work on hte persons own problems without peoples daily worries coming inbetween it and more global realities. I am not really as badly off as my fears make me feel I am, for example.
Most meditation is the brain being treated like a computer that can sort out things if you let it go and stop nudging it to take the habitual roads your conscious mind thinks it should take.
Some meditations have a a more specific job. My teacher once said that meditating on the jewel of a loved one helps you with your feelings on that person. He was talking about a person whose mother had died, but you should not I think, be noticing your emotions in this sort of meditation, you should just think of the ring and letting your unconscious mind sort things out. So, not like mindfulness, if I understand mindfullness right. Is mindfulness a Zen meditation?
The first meditational exercise my teacher taught was to just notice as the thoughts entered your head but not to hold on to the thoughts, to let them go as they are followed by another thought, which it seems to me to be a way of training the person to notice the entering thoughts, something that later helps you when you have to get rid of such in the meditation in which you center you mind on a spot, you have to hunt down entering ideas and return to the spot. THis meditation on a spot is meant to increase a persons determination, apart from bringing you down to the part of you that is always calm.
I was taught that the thing is to turn off from yourself so that your unconscious mind, though i dont know that the word unconscious was used, just mind, can deal with your problems. You might not consciously understand yourself after all. as well as it being necessary to shut down a whole lot daily worries that blur the bigger picture of your here and now.
On the subject of different bits of your mind, a book called, ¨Drawing on the right Side of the Brain¨, is useful.´Written by Betty Edwards, She says that life drawing is a right brain activity, so left hand activity, and so, she says that you need to say to yourself, I am cutting out my own verbage for a while but dont worry you should add, you can talk later on. The verbage being a left brain, right hand activity it intefers with a right brain activities. We are so constantly verbal that we find it hard to cut out on our worries and normal reactions to things, so that to cut out verbage is very uncomfortable, we want to go on rationalising and gabbing, thinking so as to concentrate just observing the angle of the lines, a cold sort of activity that is more useful is more useful in a realistic drawing than our normmal reactions to a person are.
I graduated in art and there studied in the life drawing studio, which followed the school of pianting of Tonks and Lavery and such at the Slade, a school of painting that produced such famous painters as Anthony Lopez and Uan Uglow and Craigie Aitchesen. The thing about life drawing is that normaly we seek to notice charicteristc traits of a person so as to to recognise them and to go on recognising that funny nose which allows us to recognise the person and so is what we want to talk about, but cannot really see well from every angle from ever angle and every lighting situation. Really we would like to draw that nose from the side as the Egyptians do, which does not work for portrait painting. That we want to paint the nose as we know it is so strong a desire that painting it as it looks front on with a front on light, that stops us seeing the charicteristic curves is impossible without a lot of training.
Studies on people with lobotomies show how different sides of the brain work and are mentioned in the book. I suppose this cutting off of the verbal part of the mind, that is normal in many meditational practices is the sort of thing a neurologist would be most likely to understand.
I think both mindfullness and the other discipline of meditation which is the opposite, it is cutting of the verbage and what you are feeling now, so as to allow things you are not conscious of to flower, the part of the brain that does not lose itself in todays feelings but keeps things more global maybe, would both really work for depressives.
In a way Hindu holy men, Saddhus and such are scientists, they have spent their lives noticing every phsyologiacal reaction in their bodies to emotions and actions, day in day out, becoming mendicants so as to be able to exclude other activies.They are the microscope, stethoscop etc., observing their ownselves. Buddha left his palace to do that sort of thing. They have milenario knowledge of different meditaitons and how these effect themselves and others. We just find it so hard to think other cultures have anything rocket sciency to teach us and microbioma in the soil which Monty Don Talks about as he talks about compost, is cutting edge science today wth new discoveries about the suymbiotic relationships between microbioma etc and plants being found daily.
Monty Don and the others present, it seems to me that there are other eastern concepts that might help depressives, people with July sad. What about Chi. Do you whatch Kung Fu Panda, his chi gets knocked and his young pupils get together aound him to refill it.We hear of lots of eastern technic in cartoons.
I read a book on AIkido and in Aikido you dont send your energy to the arm tha tis going to give the blow as you do in some other marcial arts, you keep it in that point an inch below your belly button but nearer your backbone. probably the centrre od balance. I take that to mean your feeling of having butterflies in your chest should be lowered to the stomach area were it does not feel half so butterflyey. WHen his students have learnt to keep their Chi in the right place and he can take students to an icey river and get them to dip in it without getting the shivers! The writer of the book seemed to consider a woman, who said she did not know what Chi was, as a person who was mischeivoulsy messing with him. I dont think it is easy for us European to understand about Chi.
The other, similar thing but Hindu is your Chakras. That t hings should satisfy your stomach, heart and head is one part of Chakras. I think when an Islamist salute is to touch theiir heart, lips and forehead that is somewhat like Chakras, If I touch my heart, lips and forhead. If i press my hand to my heart lips and forehead.
If you are being messed with your chakras go to pot in a big way , mine do and I get filled with swirly feelings. Noticing your Chakras or your Chi might be one way of noticing that you need to pull your self back into some sort of equilibrium instead of just carrying on till you feel that the ice is geting very thin. My sister, in the Legion of Christ, brain washes or tries to, people, and my chakras and chi go very wizzy as a result of the force of her mischievous power of prayer. If I sit whatching people on telly, I love people in some ways, appreciating them and trying to understand them, that brings my chi back into shape a bit, as also does company.
My experience in life is that I used to think people had humours, were shy or choloric or phegmatic, as in a Shakespeare play and what I found out in life was that your apparently shy person in fact despises talk and extrovet behaviour and their parents have taught them to despise such things. They might be taught that men dont talk, for example, unless strictly for practicle reasons. I have come to think that if you want to know what is their `problem you need to converse with them a lot.
Om this subject Jesus´s question on turning the other cheek is a very important one. So many people in fact have the idea that if someone stands on their foot, they will hang draw and quarter them. A mafia type veiw, born of a somewhat ferocious idea of how you gain respect, not by beign noble it seems or knowledgable, is an idea that maybe needs to be argued with by a psychologist but people dont usually admit to havign such an attitude so you need to talk an awful lot at least to get the whole picture. You can have the same religion and come form the same street and have very different ideas on such an impòrtant point.
After yoga I decided to help and decided to talk to tramps and just talking lets you know a lot about others. Those with mental problems real ones probably just really need to be with somone who is friendly.
More on my experience with the homeless. Saddhus, Hindu holy men who dedicate their whole life to observing their respiration and the changes in it and what caused such, it seems can positively effect the mood of people around them.they are not just turning themselves into laboratory rats This ability could be useful if you are looking after the mentally ill. My Yoga teacher Ramiro Calle actual knew some such holy men.
I have sat next to such homeless as were mad trying to just be with them in bad moments and also trying to notice their mood. Apparently those who do massages try to get their breathing in line with the person they are massaging´s breathing. So they do try to get into the same mood as their patients. an indian woman massage with a television chef., an italian one, engded up just pouring a stream of oil on his head, apparently one indian technic, all other masssages beign too much for him.
As to being with autists who do little normal intercommunication, the idea of sharing their mood instead of words or glances might give people a way to be with them. I was with an autist child and he was making merry whoops, we were in the garden, so I did too and even tried ringing the changes, returning two whoops to his one sound. I kept in the same humour as him though. He did follow me on the two whoops thing. Had he been sad, I would have made sounds in a sad mood myself I think, though in that case I might have tried to ring changes on his mood, not on the number of sounds he made. I think meditation, which is boring, at least superficially so, helps people to be with people who are not behaving in a very interactive manner. it helps people to sit and undertake what at first glance seem to be more boring tasks.
Monty Don. You said that depression is negarive, an absence of experience. My memory of it was of an absence of desire to do things, you say an absence of relationship as well as an abcense if experience, i would add, Sylvia Plaths ¨Bell Jar¨the muted world of being in a jar. Then you said you actively alientaed people you love which a sister of mine is doing but she is not depressed unless it is chronically so, so I have a reason to be interested in this bit of what you say but can you, when depressed want anything enough to take action on something? Do you then really want to alienate people because you call this alienation active? I want to know more about this. You say, you (actively) do everything you can to stop it for an number of reasons and the placing of this sentence makes it hard to see if it was going to be about stopping friends or your depression, of couse you would want to stop the depression. Do you feel some sort of fury? Do you have desires then in depression but negative ones or is it like drug abuse, wanting to be left alone, allowed to hibernate, makes you actually aggressive to others who might want to get you out and about or do you feel agressive for other reasons. Psychiatrist sasy that sometimes men who are aggressive to their wives are really hating their mothers and my experience would make me add a mother they later in life love but at some stage hated.
You say it is a destructive state of mind but I thought that was only passively so but what you say seems to hint at more. You are a man who thinks so carefully of others that it is hard to believe you are aggressive, of the problems of people who do communal gardening for example. You make an effort to clarify things for others you are generous sand hard working to be so with your knowledge.
Soil science is not just about microbes it is about physics too. You need amnino acids to quellate minerals and stp chak asy beign an unswallowably big lumpof calcium for a plant and so you need soil critters to provide you with the amino acids which quellte with minerals and also also stimulate pores in plant roots to open further that normal, all of which helps with the uptake of calcium and so the production of pectine in the plants leaves, which is not a substance that mold enjoy sucking on so it impedes th growth of molds on plant leaves.
More on MIcrobes are scientists finding microbes in the brain which can be responsible for mental problems. The new fangle functional doctors talk of it.
Is not concentrating on your activity, the digging your doing for example, a way to calm down? Away not to give your worries time to breath, as well as helping you to dig a hundred times better.
I heard a story about a butccher who said that if you cut in the way of Zen, you never have to sharpen your knife, you never blunt it.The slowness of movements, if you are mindful is what makes such as zen people, later so good at actions, even good at attention and sensitivity to others around you.
The here and now being important is also philisophical. After all, our old self is always dying, what is left of the toddler Monty? Not much. It is an arguement that is maybe meant to reduce peoples worry about death and also it is a truth, we die every minute. Our realitiy is what is happening right know not what might happen or what has happedened before, so we should look after now instead of looking after our future. If I remember right Buddha said that the only truth is change. Buddha was anxioius to stop peoples anxiety, so be ready for change and also, you have already died so often reduces is a concept that maybe peoples anxiety about dying.
Another part of the here and now is. Plant things but dont be to hung up on the end result because if you are anxiety about losing your garden or plant can make you very unhappy.
In the East they have been observing their reactions to everythinng for mileniums, so that they know so much about what makes us happy or unhappy or totally freaked out. So that they realise that being mindfullness as well as calming you down, makes you so much more efficient in all feilds.
Is not mindfulness slow cooking and gardening?
Buddha was a kings only son. I think he was worried about how to keep his people happy so he took to meditation and the here and now as the only way to that end.
I try to get this writting done as fast as possible and that causes me debilitating anxiety, considerable muscular stress and ends up creating clumsyness. if I had gone slowly at first, years ago, I would now have this typing well automised and be so much better faster and calmer at it.
In Buddhism, in Buddhist meditation, your goal is very different from that given to you by the hindues that you describe here. In buddhist meditation the goal is for you to calm down untill that part of you that is your Buddhist Nature´, is where you end up. Your Buddhist Nature is one way of talking about it, another is. That part of you that in Buddhism is said to be always in you, to be your center, a place that is always calm in every storm and tha texists in every human being.
Your medation in persuit of trying to get to that calm is to be given as a support that is boring, something that is really boring such as to look at a spot, the real work for the person meditating is to bring their mind back to a boring spot every time it wanders. So that you have to concentrate on catching yourself out every time your mind wanders and so arent able to think of or feel of your normal troubles. This excercise allows you to go down through different levels of yourself till you get to the calm that is always there in every storm.
So. Not so much, ¨Being in the Moment¨; as getting through disturbing emotions present in your mind at the moment of meditating by the activity of keeping your mind on a candle flame or spot on the wall, untill you get to the calm that is always there. It is a exercise that will take you to where you are meant to go without you having to try to get there conciously.
Monty Don, maybe the interesting thing about your description of your muddy ugly winter garden was your guilt about not working it. Is not the garden a descrption of your own self in that season in winter and so your attitue to your garden is about your depression and so you feel guilty, very bad about not working on your self: This fits in with my feeling that an excess of personal effort causes a collapse of will,maybe, in you depressives.
There is another meditation I think you might like which is to breath in thinking you are the sky and breath out thinking you are a grain of sand.
another meditation which might help you is to start at the top of the head and draw a line in your head down the right side of your head, over your ear down the side of your neck, along your shoulder, down the outside of your arm to the little fingure and round the fingures of your hand till you get to and go round your thumb and then up your arm thius time on the inside of your arm to your arm pit and then down your side and then down the out side of you right leg and round each toe and back up your leg to your crutch and then on to your left leg and round the left side of your body.
I think it might awake old memories as it seems to me to be possible that we use our bodies as memory palaces and so work this meditation might work gently on old traumas.
A similar meditation is that of starting at the top of your head and thinking down your head and then neck and tehn body and arms and then legs.
I dont htink that any exertion, like hoping to be made happy by a flower or bird glight is useful in depression it leads ot an exertion to find something that brings hope, that is too great that leads to anxixety. So mediations that help you to calm the mind down by concentrating on something that keeps you too busy to worry, such as brining your mind back to a boring spot, so boring that you are kept busy stopping your mind from wanDering, is what is needed.
Do you hear the anxiety in Monty Dons voice when he talks of all the dreams, plans and hopes for future.You can hear what an awful, terrible immense lot of anxiety such hoipes create in him. it is almost xcomic, his talking of hope and it creating anxiety. such a contardiction.
He should not be dreaming of planning or anything, it worries him so. The great Sepp Holzer says that you make your plan but then you leave off thinking of it and only get done the one bit at a time that is possible. Onlly think of todays bit.
Montty don, you should go to Ramiro Calle in Madrid to learn meditation, it is so much cloer than India.
Do you get exhausted in July? Do you do all the things you do in six mounths? If you look up on you tube Cynthia Li and Mark Hyman talking about her illness, Cynthia Li is an American doctor and part of her illness was due to mercuy poisoning and part seems to have been a mood problem, maybe caused by weakness. She talks of being visited by a couple who are her friends , maybe it is the man who is and the woman, is a chinese person who exorcises her house, so odd, also says to her, that she can teach her to be aware of herself to take heed when she is tired and such. Cynthia Li as a doctor knows all about what it is to be persuaded to stay awake to work when you are tired, to learn not to notice if she is tiresd and such. Also, i find gettign upset is something i ignore, think tha ttime iwll cary me on to another mood, partly because i get upset about things that I dont consider important rationally. Small nastynesses in life seem to make me more upset thatn I give time for and maybe sitting their noticing my feeling helps and certainly feelings make me feel something like tired.
If I sleep more then I get so much more done in the small amount of day left to me.
In ¡Europe we have Brother Ass, Saint Francis talks of the body as being brother ass but Saddhus observe their body as a way of knowing their emotional responses and their and humans psychological state, so that noticing your bodies feelings is a way to understand your mind. Christianity, in ways so useful as to psychology, is in some ways bad for it.
Should not Ramon Cajal´s discovery of the nervous system have changed all that? the knowledge of the always present communication between mind and body.
Monty Don, if hens are useful hohw about becoming a spanish shepherd? You would be out all day with the sheep.
I have another bit of knowledge on depression, that is that you should not, if you are depressed, try to find something that is wonderful enough to pull you out of it. Satisfaction in your more special work projects, project that show your worth or the best party in the world, on ht econtary, you should keep to the most boring and unglorious tasks. I just clean floors because if etc. because if I try to think of anything wonderful enough, I always decide it is not really good enough. My depressions last a few hours since I have used that technic the one of keeping things to the inglorious and boring.. MInd you, others are more disposed to depression than I am.
I got depressed when I was getting close to twenty years old and in my early twenties and decided that, in childhood you just do what you are told to do, what your parents organise for you and as you get older you start to try to think of a wonderful activity, one that will make you feel good and that that is disasterous. Just do something really boring.
Emmerson, the poet said that in the mud and filth of things something always shines. If you want something to shine don¨t look sunwards, look at the mud and filth.
Also. I once, later in life when i had lea¡rnt how to meditate, when i felt depressed one morning, decided to meditate and found out that what seemed like a lack of emotion, curiosity and desire for activity, was really a greatish tension. My natural feeling was that when i was depressed it was because I was too relaxed , but by meditating I found I was pretty tense. Interesting, what?
I once bought a book by Jung, I think it was, on libido and in the part of it i read, the conclusion of those discussing libido was that it was curiosity. In life I suppose.
Another thought on depression of mine is, that you should find things to do in the garden in autumn. I find a lot to do there in iautumn and winter but then I have a lot of wilderness to tame, brambles to cut and a lot of trees to plant.
When I first came to live in the country. i meant to to do some gardening, not to much but found that I was gardening all the time and was happy. Is light so important that it is not your moral health, your caring for others as the religious would have it or your emotional health that matters. Not the people around you, just the fact that you are outside in the light for hours. Like a cave man was I suppose.
I do so hope these letters get through to Monty Don.
I am sorry when i first started to write I had just listened ot monty don or nearly so so I had not heard the exercise Willem Kuyken gave.
Weeds are plants and whats more their is nothing prettier than grass seed heads and even the empty seed heads and the same goes for the seed heads of other weeds whoe flowers are spindly and uninspiring.
A garden is sybolic of your care of your mind and your attitudes and you say tha tin winter your garden is a mess which is terrible.
By the by, in a Tea House you sometimes get an inner garden and outer. one to be seen from beyonf the inner fence. You have symboli things in the inner garden like a sink and tap to give you drinking water and allow you to clean up a bit. Also a compost pit. and a fence, the fance whoswe sybolism is that a garden is a human thing that is separeted from the wild beyond. Is the inner garden tha ttabernacle?
A tea house is about the humble and villagey but then they have got a bit too artistic and interestd in patina, and such, there is even the possibility of carelessly chucking into you compost pit a geranium or two when guests arrive so absolutely getting rid of the humble and earthy. humas will go towards the shee she,
I am studying hte tea house for you. Age and patiuna chiipped edges are called Sabi, pronounced in english, sobby and is a principle of your tea house, a place that looks lived in and not new, the old and wrinkled,
The principle of Wabi sabi is pat of a tea house. Wabi is pronounced in English wobbly and is the principle of things being inperfect unbalanced, not your Leonardos perfect proportioned man but your Rembrandts absolutly cute but inprerfect woman in the river. Not your transcendenlty but your messy humanity that you have to love that way. Long live wobbly, sobby I say.