I agree meditation can give you a more positive outlook on life, but so can this simple exercise: Get yourself a little book, or big if you prefer 🙂 and a pen. Every evening list at least three things that happened that day that made you feel good. It could be something you saw, something you or someone else did, something you heard, something you read, or felt or smelt…… three things minimum written in your book every evening for the next 7 days. I promise you as the days go on you notice more and more positive things about your life.

Let me know how you go…

(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)

 

Adaptation is the key to survival

(Passing on to a friend something I have come to learn)

You don’t ever ‘get better’, ‘recover’, from mental health ‘issues’ – serious or otherwise; what you do is adapt to them, accept them, that is the ‘trick’ to coming to terms with a new way of living. And it is ‘living’, it is life, just a different one that you perhaps once believed you would lead.

And part of this new paradigm of living is to accept that you will fall back from time to time, but that this is not ‘the end’ and you will not die – because you have been here before, and you survived, and you will survive again, and you will go on, go on living, even thriving.

And with each fall back there will be, in the back of your mind, even in the worst of times, that knowledge that grows just a little each time you fall; that you have been here before and it did not kill you.

This is the ‘trick’ to living: to accept this new paradigm of being.

Accept it, make it a simple thing to accept it: that you will never be ‘normal’, but then again; define ‘normal’? No one is that thing, it’s just that some of us are at a different point along an imaginary line that means we feel the sting of being human that bit more than most.

But we also feel so many other things at a heightened level, and they are there; the ‘highs’, these are the gifts of our ‘condition’. Enjoy them, revel in them, and in time, they will help you realise that you are very lucky to be who you are. You may not feel it today – but it will come. It will come. Hang on, hold on to the world with both hands – there are more of us than you know.

By Andrew Meek author of Code Words: A Poetry Collection on the Theme of Love and Loss and Being and Becoming.