Happy New Year!

New Year's Day started early, driving husband to airport to join a 'Community Recovery Team' in one of the Queensland regional flood affected areas. He will be assessing flood damage and enabling emergency welfare payments to householders. A great example of 'doing what matters', even though I cannot claim any personal credit for this one...

 

Insomnia 1.1.11

I love the simplicity of today's date!

This drawing illustrates an night of insomnia recently experienced - actually (and perhaps not coincidentally) the night after I posted the last entry, and then linked it to Facebook. Now, I don't have a good sleeping pattern usually, but had noticed during the holidays with lower stress levels, and the soothing sound of rain on the roof most nights, I was sleeping better, despite frequent night sweats and other horrors usually attributed to the menopause. However, on this occasion I awoke in the early hours (when it was still dark), and had several mini-panic attacks (apologies if you have had real panic attacks, I had one once and it was much worse than this), at the thought of my blog being seen by other human beings. Oh my god, what had I done?

To return to the drawing, if you look carefully you will notice in the window of my bedroom there is a badly drawn obese owl, who is commenting helpfully 'notice the thoughts and let them go'. This is supposed to represent the 'Observing Self' in Acceptance and Commitment Therapy http://www.actmindfully.com.au/, which is the psychological framework I am using for this experiment.

What is the Observing Self? It is a part of ourselves which is not our thoughts. In other words, when we constantly get caught up in our thoughts, which are often unhelpful, we need to try to 'tune in' to the more chilled Observing Self, which just notices the thoughts and, as the wise owl says, lets them come and go, without trying to change them in any way. It is really hard to remember that we are more than our thoughts, as they tend to dominate our consciousness, and we usually pay them far too much attention. As Descartes said, 'I think therefore I am'.

Mindfulness practices (such as meditation) are perhaps one of the best ways to experience the Observing Self (and believe me, it only happens fleetingly) -something those Buddhist monks have known about for centuries. So one of my committed actions is to mediate everyday -something I started doing again last year after first learning Transcendental Meditation (TM) when I was fifteen. I actually enjoy doing it so its no great chore.

Another way of being mindful is to be creative, as when we are making things, the mind needs to work in tandem with our hands and our senses, and so has less opportunity to be a thought production factory...and hence a couple of examples of recent knitted creations follow. The first was actually commissioned by someone, hope she likes it! (I notice my mind could have a field day with that thought, thank you mind!)

tea cosy on bird cage

christmas tree on my front door



I am still working on breaking down my values into behavioural goals.

In relation to health, I have recently been to a new woman GP who is I feel confident will be a helpful resource in my quest for optimum well-being. I also ran 3 kms and cycled 6 kms at the gym yesterday, which slightly made up for pizza, flourless chocolate cake and other seasonal delights (well, thats how we celebrate the dog days after christmas in my world).

And in relation to frugality, I used christmas leftover lamb to make dinner last night, and, if I say so myself, it was delicious. I made Egyptian Stuffed Flatbread from Jamie Oliver's America. (Another Egyptian reference! - see previous post).  I am a big Oliver fan, at least, his recipes are great.

I also cleared out my linen cupboard (interesting fact - linen is known as 'manchester' in Oz, since that is where it used to come from - now it should be called 'china' - oh, that is already the name for something else imported). I gave some old duvet covers (known in Oz as 'doonas' - I am going to need a glossary at this rate) and sheets away, and put more stuff in the Lifeline bin, so there is more space in the cupboard. Linen is another item I used to buy a lot of...

More later.