Who Knew?

After waking up on Monday morning and knowing that I needed to make some serious changes to my life, I've researched and read more on the concept of 'Mindfulness'. I can't pretend that I had heard of it while I was nursing; I can't even say that someone has recommended it to me, because until Monday, Mindfulness wasn't even a word I ever used. I certainly didn't know it was a very well researched and reviewed behavioural technique. I had no idea that it had been written about extensively and that it is used around the world as a therapeutic tool, for improving mental and physical health. However, over the last six months, certainly since I have been feeling increasingly depressed, deep down I knew what I had to do. Well, I mean I was aware that it was my mental approach to my physical pain that was the problem and that I needed the tools to help me find a different way of coping. I also felt (in my own words), that I was looking at it all wrong and that I had to be missing a healthy, holistic coping mechanism that other people obviously knew all about. However, to balance it out and to give you the whole picture, I also thought I'd exhausted everything, from medication, therapy, spiritual healing and all the most widely available complementary therapies. In other words, when I woke up yesterday morning, I believed I had to discover something new. I didn't know there was a whole world of mindfulness out there to explore.

Before I publish this blog entry, I want to make a note to myself. I have chronic, disabling, unrelenting pain. I regularly feel the power of a blowtorch on my face, a highly charged electrical surge across my cheek made worse by the gentlest breeze, the constant grinding ache in my teeth, permanent pressure in my head, eye and temple and a dense burning numbness that often paralyses me, through fear of the slightest change in temperature. This is my existence, my reality, my life. You may feel the description is dramatic, but only I know how horrendous my pain is. I live with this day and night. At the same time, I take a ridiculous cocktail of medications that should knock out a horse, they inflict horrible side effects; short term memory loss, tremors, confusion and drowsiness to name just a few. This is, as well as, the pain. I have to accept that this is my reality. 

However, there would be no point in pursuing the positive, unquestionable benefits of mindfulness if I remain focused on the negatives in my life. But I'm about to put my energy into finding a way of living with this reality and I hope to write about the ups and downs and the challenges I face. It is important to me, that my note to self, gives me something to reflect on in the future, perhaps to see how much progress I've made or to remind myself of where I was, emotionally and physically, today. I have not written this note to myself as a 'get out clause' or an excuse to fail. But I won't belittle my reality and the pain that other people living with TN have, just to write a positive blog entry. Acknowledging how bad things really are will hopefully give a true insight into the real outcome of embracing a new approach of living mindfully. 

Image by Nikki Samuel