Change

Last week I'd had 2 months of severe anxiety & depression behind me and I was feeling desperate. The thing I was most tired of was fighting the whole thing, it's so exhausting to constantly deal with your head, deal with the fears and it takes over your whole life squeezing every ounce of joy and happiness out of it. On top of that I felt guilty because I felt I was failing my children. And it left me feeling suicidal. I looked for solutions everywhere and ended up doing a few meditations at the London Buddhist Centre, there I found a book called the Mindful way to self compassion (Christopher K Germer), which is a way to relate to yourself with love and compassion, like you would if you were soothing a child in distress, it's about not wishing your difficult emotions away, but facing them and it reduces their power over you. In life there will always be difficult emotions and we sufferers of anxiety I believe are very sensitive people who have run away from normal emotions and have turned them into something more powerful than they need to be. As soon as I started reading the book, I felt a sense of relief and instead of scolding myself for having anxiety & depression I have tried to stop giving myself such a hard time about it...I know this is not for everyone, but I think for me meditation is the way forward and the guided meditations at the buddhist centre are amazing...At the moment, I feel a sense of hope, I also have made the decision not to start medication as I thought I really needed to last week, I'm going to try and go down this road for a while and see how I go. If I fall back into really dark times, I will re-consider, but actually for the first time in a long time, I am not afraid anymore of the anxiety...I think being afraid of anxiety is a very dark place to be...and I think it is imperative we try to face it and say, "I know I have anxiety, but it can't hurt me" and I don't have to be embarrassed about it...I think shame is a big ingredient in the affliction of anxiety...we all feel so ashamed of our feelings because we want to come across as individuals that cope well with life...but life is not easy and we are only human...we should pat ourselves on the back for what we DO do. And how we cope with the struggle with our anxiety...