No Backwards Steps

A few weeks ago, I started meditating again. Not the irregular, on-the-bus or as an excuse for a nap kind of meditating I had been doing over the last couple of years, but back to the kind of daily, intentional meditation I was doing back in 2020, when I’d got to a point where I was very low with my mood and self-image, and I really needed to build myself from the ground up.

If you’ve been following this newsletter for a while you’ll know that my feelings towards wellness practices are ambivalent. Meditation, yoga, journaling, these things have really rescued me at points where nothing else could. But I’m always cautious about putting too much emphasis on these practices alone. They can put a whole lot of pressure on a person who is struggling with their mental health to scoop themselves up out of a hole when what is also required is a whole set of very concrete supports: money, medication, job stability, housing stability, healthy relationships, freedom, time in nature, the list goes on. But I’ve also found it is entirely possible to put too little emphasis on my own power, and to forget all the things I can do to shift my mood.

So, re-downloading Headspace, because I really do need the accountability of a run streak and of minutes meditated, I felt a little as though I was taking backwards steps. Here we are again, struggling with mental health, needing to take action. And sitting in silence for just ten minutes, I couldn’t believe how many thoughts there were in my head, how quickly they were moving, and how many of them seemed to be bent on self-flagellation. It was like discovering a corner of my room I’d been neglecting to vacuum for more than a years, maybe decades. The build-up of dust and dirt made me want to crawl out of my own skin. But I made it through, and I went back to it the day after, and the next, and now I’ve meditated for seventeen consecutive days. Not every day has been better, but something is starting to shift.

My favourite meditation is one where you imagine your whole body filling with sunshine. For me, this is the magic of meditation. You don’t have to battle with your thoughts because you’re relying on your imagination, and more and more these days I think of depression as a failure of imagination. You can’t imagine things getting better, you can’t imagine things other than they are. Of course, there are times when things really are dire and what’s required is not so much mood alteration as survival. But very often change is possible and probably inevitable, only you can’t see it because your vision of the future has become so narrow that you can’t see anything ever changing.

But you can think of imagination as a muscle that needs to be flexed. That’s what meditation does, as well as reading fiction, or writing, or dancing, drawing, or going to watch a film. For me, meditation is the purest and most powerful way of exercising my imagination because there is no output and no object. There is simply a decision to let thoughts arise and then sink, and to turn your attention instead to the weird and wonderful images and sensations your mind has decided to conjure for you.

You can take this newsletter from me as confirmation that whatever old habit was once working for you, whatever it is that once soothed your mind and your body — however far back you have to go to find it — it’s no backward step to return to it.

Love, Rosie xxx