Yep, it’s that time of year already – again. Welcome to the season that packs so much into itself:

• The “silly season”
• The season of goodwill
• Of giving and receiving
• Of remembering or maybe even trying to forget…
• Of balancing extra pressure and expectations
• Of anniversaries and reflections; joy and pain.

It’s a complicated time of year…

So as you prepare yourself for whatever shades of the seasonal spectrum that you will face this time, maybe it’s work asking:

What will you give yourself this year?

(And you know I’m not talking about the material stuff here).

Or perhaps it’s easier to think about what you might like to receive from yourself?

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Sometimes it’s hard not to feel like an outsider. Like you don’t quite fit in.

Maybe you’re carrying a certain sadness that sets you apart from the places that other people seem to inhabit right now. Or maybe you doubt your worth or your ability to contribute sometimes. Maybe you just feel “different.” Or even “weird.” Or that your values or the way you want to live your life aren’t quite what society currently sees as “normal.”

Feeling a bit out of step with the people around you – your family or work colleagues or friends – is often tough. One theory suggests there are two opposing “life forces” we balance inside ourselves: the “force of individuality” and the “force of togetherness.” Individuality is about our uniqueness, while togetherness is thought to heighten our sense of safety and survival in a group.

So it can be tempting trade self for safety sometimes. To hide your points of difference and gloss over them. To keep the surface calm so that no-one else’s boat is rocked. To muffle the parts of you that would sing a different tune. To shrink yourself to make the anxiety smaller, too. (All of which usually just means that you get to keep all the dissonance inside you, instead of sharing it around).

What if there was another way?

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Have you ever tried to make up your mind about something and then found yourself lost in a never-ending argument of pros and cons? Looking for “the right” answer… Where you catch yourself thinking: “On this hand…” and “On the other hand…” until it’s all completely out of hand?

And now you’re feeling even more lost than when you started. Swamped. Confused.

I know I have.

Yet maybe there’s another way through all of this. For if world class thinking theorist Edward de Bono is right, the way you explore an issue is key. In fact, he thinks that:

“If you explore well, a decision makes itself.”

.

(And how handy would that be?)

So what’s he actually on about? And how might you be able to try some of it out?

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I have a love-hate relationship with one of the major therapies endorsed by psychology today: cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT).

Both as a therapist, and as a client, I know it can work. It can bring fast relief in acute times. So it’s a good thing to have in your inner toolbox when you’re working with the challenges life can throw you.

In a (very small) nutshell, CBT asks you to question your thoughts, and the beliefs that underpin them. It asks you to have another look at the way you’ve got things set up in your mind. To see if the conclusions that it’s so easy to jump to in the heat of the moment are actually even real or right. To renovate the interior of your inner-most home. And it has a few user-friendly formulas to do it with.

Which all sounds great, right?

But something about CBT also irritates me. Because it seems a bit patronising, sometimes, to be sort of “taught” to “un-think” or un-learn your so-called “negative thoughts.” To sort of shuffle things around in your skull to just think a little differently.

Sometimes that seems a bit fake. A bit try-hard. A bit rose-tinted glasses goody-two-shoes to suggest that there are “right ways” and “wrong” ways to think.

But then I have to remind myself that there’s also a whole lot more to CBT than just hoodwinking yourself with word games and tricky thinking. For at another level, this seemingly formulaic therapy can also reflect elements of much deeper, much older wisdoms such as:

“You are not your thoughts”

(which I once heard spoken by a Buddhist monk on the radio).

What do you think about that idea?

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How will you know that you’re ready to start? Once you’ve planned and perfected and plotted all your goals on a graph, like we’re so often encouraged to do. How will you know you’re ready?

It’s an important question, whatever change or dream or hope you might be facing. (And, life being what it is, it’s pretty rare not to be facing one of these sorts of things…)

So how will you know you’ve done enough preparing and perfecting of the plan - and when it’s time to just take the plunge?

Does the perfecting have a use-by date?

Or is it something you could get lost in the safety of and languish in forever if you wanted to?

Something comfortable, even?

Something that perhaps beguiles you with the promise of being able to predict and resolve almost any problem that may arise – before they appear, of course. (And in a universe of potentially infinite possibilities and permutations, is that even possible?)

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You know the story, an apple a day’s supposed to keep the doctor away. But can a healthy diet also help keep depression at bay, too? Some researchers see a connection.

And that’s important, because sometimes depression’s treated as though it’s “all in your head.”

As it turns out, it may well be in your body, too.

And, if that’s the case for you, then it’s worth investigating. So let’s take a quick look…

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I bought a pair of shoes a little while ago. They’re red. They’re great. They were the last pair in the shop, my size and on sale. Perfect.

Well, not quite, actually, because they pinched a bit when I tried them on. But surely not too much. Surely they’d get better with time… I’ll take them.

But when I tried them on again at home (after wearing them around for days with thick socks on to stretch them), and they still pinched, I thought:

“What planet was I on when I bought these?”

And, instantly, I knew:

“Planet Wishfulness.”

Have you ever been there?

It’s a trivial example, but it can happen anywhere – in relationships, in your work, in pretty much any part of life. Wishing that something would fit you, when it just doesn’t … not quite.

For wishing can clash with reality; it can hide what’s really going on; it can get in the way of you making decisions that might be really important to make.

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You are not a machine.

You’re mortal. Organic. You don’t come in a shape that will always easily slot into all the timetables and schedules and systems that beckon.

That’s probably no surprise. (And yet how many demands do you put on yourself sometimes?)

So there might be times when you can’t “keep on keeping on,” or where maybe you don’t always have the energy to “push on through.” Where it’s not always so easy to “just do it.”

Times, instead, where you might need to rest.
Replenish.
Respect the boundaries of your humanness – perfectly imperfect just as it is – and simply restore the balance a little. To stop treating yourself like the machine that you’re not…

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Cloudy days will come.

For you. For your family. For your friends.

And not just the kind that dominate the skies above you. But also the ones that help set the weather within you. The internal cloudy days that send your mental and emotional landscape into overcast sadness.

Cloudy days will come…

I was thinking this the other day, when some of my family came to Sydney to visit. Even now, in spring, it was suddenly cold and wet again. And even though it was sun that we wanted, it was cloud and some rain that we got (as you can see in the photo).

So what do you do when the internal cloudy days come to visit? How can you get through them? Or maybe even prepare for them? On this year’s Mental Health Day, perhaps it’s worth getting mentally meteorological and taking a look at what you’ll do when your weather changes.

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I came home tired the other day – flat. Feeling the pressure of all the tasks I “should” be doing. Hearing the list of responsibilities that were calling my name. The weight of obligation over pleasure or rest.

When things start to feel like this, I tend to put my head down, my blinkers on and just keep ploughing through. It’s as though there’s no time to stop and breathe – that somehow I don’t “deserve” to just yet. And life turns into a dead to-do list or a string of endless homework.

Have you ever felt a bit like that?

And then, as I unlatched the gate to home, something broke that spell. A simple flower. Or, actually, a rather complex one (the one in the photos). 

The way it was just blossoming all over the place, white spilling out purple and yellow, literally brought me to my senses again.

It invited me to look closer:
• at its petals and patterns
• at this moment of light and colour and scent
• at life as it is just now.

So, in a way, it was mindfulness in action.

And that’s the thing about mindfulness. It’s nothing “special.” Yet it’s immensely potent. It can reconnect you to a sense of the sacred even in the middle of the mundane. It’s something you can tap into at any moment you like. And it can add untold fathoms of depth to even the flattest of days.

How?

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