Hello @Bunniekins (hugs, beautiful, love your flower 
). Warm hellos to @Faith-and-Hope @outlander @Zoe7, @Sophia1.
I've only just started reading posts from since I last visited the forum some time ago.
Wondering how everyone is going with this historic time we are living through.
For me things feel wearing, deeply troubling, even though I live in Queensland which hasn't (yet) turned into a real hot spot. May it be free of that. The same for other places everywhere, may they become free of it as well in quickest time.
@Exoplanet I first saw your bird pictures scrolling big on my desktop from top to bottom and found myself literally saying wow. First happiness that you were there at the beach, you made it happen, and it was marvellous. Then the photos themselves, especially Sea Eagles, Speckled Bird. How did you get so close? Wonderful to see them all.
Then I read out of order your post about having a massage. Brilliant that you had that nurturance, so pleased to hear it. Your description of the body challenges, not thought through in advance, funny and beautiful. The fact you went with the flow and enjoyed it, yay!!!
Then I read what you said about the anxiety in the lead to the trip being all part of the excitement. I like that way of looking at it. And the reward being a great, life-affirming experience. Happy hugs, dear friend.
@eth I've only read one post in A Long Rave so far, and wonder how your life has been since our last meeting.
This year has been such a huge sleeping immobile slump here up until recently, maybe the last month or a bit more. I have started with a support worker. We went for our first hour-long 'walk and talk' on the beach on Friday. So good to be out in that wonderful place, while getting to know each other a little. We will continue weekly.
Occupational therapy and social work may be available for me as well for the next six months. The organisation assessed me over the phone and then offered a free-to-me, non-NDIS support program on referral from my GP. Also groups, which I would very much like to be part of, but I have not joined any yet as a health precaution.
I have been experiencing more physical pain and troubling symptoms like dizziness sometimes three or more times a day, head pressure, very noticable pulsatile tinnitus, other neurological things. This coupled with lack of diagnoses despite quite a few tests (MRI, CAT scan, 24 hour heart monitoring, blood tests galore), more coming.
Greater health worries than usual, most likely in an exaggerated way to some degree due to the slump state and just generalised anxiety I experience always, and more so at this time. Fully understandable, the mystery of the troubling symptoms and, more as I'm getting older, just stronger and more difficult pain all over my body in different ways, some worse than others. A vague queasy nausea keeps me from breakfast for a number of hours some days.
I know I'm probably going to just have to live with it as I get older. Even if diagnoses arrive, these conditions are very likely not fixable, maybe symptoms alleviated to some degree, like most of the chronic illnesses I have lived with and still do.
I've been thinking about the pain of aging and death in general, trying to find an acceptance and greater serenity with it, a broader philosophical perspective about how natural it is, part of the grand mystery of existence, of which I truly experience wonderment and gratitude.
I know some of this wisdom about life and death to some degree, but it's so easy to just say it or think it. Maybe I'm feeling it more, just a little, and am encouraging that tentatively and in small steps (that old cliche, true like many of them, I am guessing). So perhaps living better with the physical realities of life, somewhere amidst my fear, mostly of suffering. The fear of more of it to come.
I've been doing a lot of deep breathing at different times through each day, even when up and walking, in the toilet (lol), kitchen, outside, visiting close friend, etc, whenever I feel in a bit of trouble with things.
This is helping manage anxiety, relaxing body, even though it swings back to the tense painful state it was in very easily. My psychologist helped me understand a little more deeply recently that it's repetition of these things that starts the new and more helpful neural patterns, which then grow into more habitual responses as we continue.
For me the focus is on breathing. I have a 'breathe' sign on the wall above my computer and noticable from different parts of the main room, kitchen. I coloured it in and added small patterns within the large letters in the art class at the (sadly now closed) mental health hub near where I live.
Because I hear my pulse noticably in my head 24/7, I can also hear that deep breathing slows and quietens the blood through my veins very soon after starting to do it.
I read recently from a reputable source that deep breathing, even just the classic slow breathe in four, and that out four: this tells our sympathetic nervous system the danger we perceived has passed, allowing our bodies to calm down from fight-or-flight. I find this sets off an almost automatic whole body relaxation, not completely of course, but the body more relaxed than it was before. This has got to be a good thing in the long run. May relaxation grow for all of us.
In any case, since I was accepted by the new support organisation and knew I would be getting some psychosocial support, things have slowly been looking up with me. From past experience I know this kind of support helps me improve the quality of my life. Seems possible for this to happen even swimming against the tide of this difficult global time. May the onward and upward path continue for us all.
And in fact a slow upward direction seems to be happening, with more creative engagement and having completed now the first draft of a new video. The arrival of the pandemic almost completely halted film-making for me for months.. To have one at this stage of completion now is a really good sign of my engagement with what I love about life again.
Being able to sleep a bit less than the long, long hours happening for months, and sometimes in longer chunks than three hours.
Also I have been getting out for walks a little more lately. For most of this year doing that was almost never. Now a handful of trips to the beach and the beautiful wetland nature reserve near my friend's house.
So healing, calming, pleasurable to be in nature's company, marvelling at it, loving it.
Everything continuing on regardless of the human concerns. May we heal and be healed by nature.
Well wishes all.
p.s. exo, just saw your shell and other beach photos. Fantastic!!!
