Hello

It’s really good to hear you found the public MH services helpful for you @EternalFlower.

wondering how your day and @Dimitys day has been?

I am pretty tired actually, may be an early one for me, dimity wonder if you saw my friendly spider 😊

Lovely to see you around the forums as always @RiverSeal hope you have had a good day and thanks for sharing about the recovery club it looks good. 😊

Hi @Chasingsunsets yes I spotted the spider but her web looked a bit tatty and ditty poor thing, hope she rebuilt overnight.

I got my exercises done last night so thanks for reminding me.

It's good you can get your therapy in the public system @EternalFlower . My gp wrote I should have dbt but I don't know how to access it or if it's even suitable for my diagnosis.

Quiet day today, at a bit of a loss really. Can hear a currawong and lorikeets plus a mystery bird.

Hehe I know right re her web @Dimity 🤭. You can understand why I was judgemental about her web 🤣. She hasn’t fixed it it’s been like that for probably 3 weeks/ a month. She seems very happy there!

yess I didn’t hear back from you and thought that you got tired after your exercises lol well done! Did you sleep ok last night? I think you’ll get benefits from dbt without knowing too much of your history, are you still doing emdr? Love the sounds you are listening too, right now a plane is going over and couple of birds sounds like fig birds and maybe lorikeets. Love your mystery bird made me laugh ☺️. Shock horror not walking tonight I would love too but I need to cook some food. Motivation low as and my fury friend is starring at me waiting to go on a walk 😬 guilt 101. But we will do scent training instead ☺️ whilst I cook just got to get out of bed 🤪. What’s for tea? Maybe exercises later if youre up for it 😊

@Chasingsunsets Hope you get a good meal, A plus for effort. Mine was a pot of beans and barley, I'm semi veggo. Added other veg and flavours so not too bad.

My sleep is a bit out of whack, often happens. Need to get anxiety under control but I can't solve the worries. Oh well. It would be nice to reimagine and reinvent my life - I wonder if anyone has that as a specialty? My psychologist thinks the emdr will help but we're not doing it systematically.

Hope you can get back to your walks soon. Don't know anything about scent training except detector dogs in all sorts of jobs including finding rare critters in conservation work. Does Indi enjoy it? She sounds pretty smart.

Sending a cheerio @Cuddlebear , hope you're going ok.

Evening @Dimity sorry for my late reply. How are you doing? Have been thinking of you even when not on the forum and waiting until I could jump back on to write this msg. I ended up making a chicken curry it was ok, I used a different paste and don’t think I’ll use that brand again. Beans and barley sound really healthy!

How do your sleeping patterns play out? Do you find your meds help with your anxiety? It’s interesting what you said about reimagining/ reinventing your life. Sometimes I wish this too. I wonder when you typed this does this mean your whole life or life from now, because I guess good to perhaps propel us into things we want to achieve but if looking in the past I wonder if these are helpful thoughts or keeping us stuck and/or if this is some disassociation? I get what you mean re doing parts of emdr but not systematically, sounds like a safe way to explore it? How are you finding it? I do love the window of tolerance explanation and emdr really does talk a lot about that hey, I do like the thought behind bilateral stimulation.

Yess that’s right re scent training but we just do it for fun, I have trained her for most of her life re obedience, trick training, some agility stuff and scent stuff! Scent stuff is a lot of fun and really good to do when I want to tire her out or if I don’t have time for a walk. She loves it and it tires them out in a different way. She’s trained on a tree scent (boring) lol and then we introduced a better object my car keys 🤣. Through scent training she had combined her training with her passion lol finding lost 🎾 on our walks 🤣, so yesterday I made it fun for her to find a ball and then give her a couple of throws before rehiring ☺️. Also leant just as a hobby to find things at a larger scale and if she was younger I’d consider further training re search and rescue but just focusing on keeping everything fun now and celebrate all her wins, honestly I would have loved to train her for S&R but I know it’s kinder for her to just do it as fun, she’s a bit old to do it on a serious level. I still have to remind myself it’s for fun 🤣 because my mind clicks into everything is for “sheep’s stations” lol I just like a good job done more than being competitive if that makes sense haha. She really is my best mate we have had so much fun, she came into my life at a very very low point in my life. I never expected her to help me, I just wanted to give her the best life possible, in the process she has helped me incredibly so deserves everything I give her and more. I work shift work and feel so guilty sometimes but she handles it like a trooper always has that’s why on my days off or shifts where I have evenings free all I want to do is walk her and it’s something she enjoys and looks forward to, I know she waits for these moments and so do I 😊.

oh yesss about conservation and scent work have you come across the koala detector dogs? It’s so awesome and the detector dogs work when they were finding injured koalas from the bush fires. Incredibly sad for the koalas but love they could be found so they could get treatment.

What do you enjoy doing?

below is a pic of a bird which has an even better call than the fig bird, not as easily seen 😊 not great shots this one was up high!

Missing you here @Cuddlebear, always in our thoughts here. How are you travelling? @Dimity 

@Chasingsunsets Tired and a bit gaga here so might hold off on replying properly til tomorrow. Shiftwork would be challenging for you especially if like me your mh is tied in with sleep patterns (a feast or famine or wrong timing).

Gotta love Indi she really does sound smart.

I sometimes use a red curry paste, especially for a pumpkin or sweet potato and red lentil soup with loads of fresh coriander. I do eat chicken about once a week.

Nodding off here so will say good night

Hehe @Dimity sleep well my friend, you have me thinking of lady Gaga now 😅🎶🥁. I need to go to sleep too before I flip into I dunno what rhythm 😜. Shift work can be tricky, I generally handle it surprisingly well actually, go figure. Probably because even without shift work I seem to flip into different rhythms, work amazingly grounds me which I find super interesting. I do agree though steady sleep routines would help but then on the other hand sometimes I am lucky re shift work means it can catch me in the cycle I’m in so easy to progress into what ever shift, so two ways to look at it I guess. Don’t know reg sleep patterns always been in a job with shifts 😊 and before that when steady hours re sleep times mh was interesting too so I don’t know the answer lol. Not sure if that makes sense. Hehe.

No stress with you reply I did write you an essay 😅📚.

That soup sounds delicious, I actually used green curry paste, went to the shops for red and came back with green 🤣.

When reading about you soup it made me think of sometimes when I have made pumpkin soup I put red curry paste and some coconut cream/milk soooo good 😋. Haven’t made it for ages might have to make it soon. Talking about it has made me want to make it 😅

night night and again hope you sleep well and catch some zzzs🤞

Yes I use coconut milk in my pumpkin curry soup too @Chasingsunsets

Today I read about a sniffer dog detecting critically endangered plants in a Melbourne park.

That bird looks quite big.

I had a currawong on my fence, and the butcherbird was on a TV aerial. I rarely see them so it was a thrill. I heard a mystery bird in the dawn chorus this morning.

Take care 💙