Adventures in the woods
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Get out of your own way
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- tim.howarth
- June 18, 2024
- 1:31 pm
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Are you struggling in this fast paced and overwhelming world. Are you suffering, feeling burnt out, in chronic pain, stressed, anxious. This is my intro to me and my emotional wellbeing journey. A voyage over 40 years of self exploration, involving anxiety, therapy, denial, grief, a neurological condition and a self enquiry that has unearthed a multitude of insights and realisations that I feel are not widely understood. This is not mental health by my terms this is the human condition and I’d like us all to start talking about it without prejudice or judgement. To look at ourselves as having everything we need to heal and to moving into a new consciousness. I might have some tools that you find useful!
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The Art of allowing
I was running on the downs the other day as I like to do. It’s more of a meditative exercise for me and it enables me to mull over things whilst I run and process thoughts and feelings whilst also focusing on my breathing and throwing one foot in front of the other!
So a thought came to me this time, that the best gift we could give ourselves right now is allowing. Perhaps it’s something some do naturally, but certainly for me as a creative person who’s learned to be self motivated and needs to be actively creating, the thought that maybe taking more breaks and allowing the creative flow to happen over a greater period of time is perhaps a healthier way to operate.
I guess I’ve learned to focus myself over the years and having had an art school education, I seem to have absorbed this quote from Picasso “Inspiration exists, but it has to find us working.” So the concept of formulating new ideas but only because you’ve turned up with the mindset that you’re in work mode, has kind if functioned over the years, and I’m not paralysed by the idea of starting a new project.
However, I’m trying to explore this notion of allowing, that actually taking your eye off the ball so to speak, might bare more creative fruit over time and that this slightly obsessive approach to staying in the moment and ‘pushing’ to get inspired is not serving the bigger picture.
But also bringing this new mindset to a broader sense of living might be a good thing too. Perhaps allowing in other aspects of life might be a healthier approach as well?
I think I’ve been guilty of over thinking situations, using intellect and reason as the correct and logical perspective and I’m starting to realise that maybe holding off with a response, letting a situation or series of events unfold before I decide to have an input could be a much healthier way of operating.
Maybe the universe has a flow and intellect will often interrupt that process and maybe I should be slower within my operating than I’ve previously been, that allowing is a kind of ‘oil’ that greases our modus operandi and when we get the motion just right, the allowing lubricates our methodology to enable insight and inspiration………maybe?
We allow by simply pausing with the intention to relax our resistance and let the experience be just as it is.
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Anxiety & acceptance
ANXIETY & ACCEPTANCE
I’d like to share an aspect of me that I perceived to be a weakness and venerability for a large part of my adult life, but the more I got to understand it, the more it defined me in a good way.
Anxiety attacks came into my life as a kid, from about the age of 8 onwards, but very infrequently. A feeling of utter fear and panic, manifesting itself as a ringing in my ears, a very heightened state of awareness, with almost tunnel vision and an extreme pounding heart and feeling as though I was about to die. I was certainly not aware at the time what exactly was going on and I almost always ran out of the situation to avoid the overwhelming feelings. Obviously, the feelings came with me, but they lessened within seconds and vanished as soon as I felt safe again!
It wasn’t till I was 20 and in an interview to try and get into art college that the panic attacks found a new extreme. I was in a room with 8 people all asking questions about me and why I wanted to attend this particular course and suddenly, on the end of 2 questions at once, my mind went totally blank and a panic attack started, the next thing I knew, I was being picked up off the floor….I had fainted.
How embarrassing, so my Demon had finally come to light, these panic attacks had an end result, total humiliation and passing out! Not necessarily the end of the world, I hear you say, but at 20 years old and full of beans a vigour, it had a profound affect on my personality and my self confidence. A dulling and a harming, that guided me into dysfunctional relationships and avoidance. As an aspiring musician, it guided me away from performing and playing live. It kept me from attending anything I could perceive as an interview, so getting work and employment was not easy. (But that could also be because I had an art degree by that time!…. I jest)
But, I share this with you not to seek sympathy or further humiliation, but to declare that it guided me in a positive way too, to find answers, it set me on a course to find out things, things about myself and things about us humans. Insights into not just my behaviour, but all human behaviour. I read books (remember those?) I attended therapy, I did work on myself, I sought to unearth the cause of this malady.
Did I get the answers I went looking for, yeah, some, but the biggest revelation came in the form of declaration and acceptance. Declare to those you’re trying to hide yourself from and accept that this is not something that is happening to you, its a part of you that needs caring for, nurturing and loving like a vulnerable child….Hmmmm?(to be explored another time) Take your demons by the hand, show them understanding and that they are integral to you being you, that embracing them is an intrinsic aspect of the whole you and allow them to co- exist. Don’t get scared if they show their heads occasionally, and they will, find faith and solace in owning something powerful but indeterminable and steer yourself well!
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All we need is love …..music
The one thing that has provided consistent stability and has nurtured me through all kinds of turmoil is MUSIC. Initially listening to it, feeling completely engulfed in its emotional content and trusting that it was a good and healthy activity. Then later on, learning to create it and develop my process. Allowing myself to fall over with it, be awful, be amazing, make a mess, but above all make something that moves me.
Maybe that’s an indication of a slightly obsessive side to my personality, maybe I’m just a product of my upbringing and the particular time in history when certain experiences and events were imprinted in me. Yes I’m a child of the seventies with a sense that those were the best years musically ‘ever’. But, it’s moulded me, it’s supported me, its defined aspects of my behaviour.
Speak to any musical practitioner that has been creating for a few years and they’ll all say the same thing. Music is the ‘language of the soul’, ‘it speaks to me like nothing else can’, ‘It heals me’. Very few people on this planet will have a disconnect to music. Whether we are aware of it or not, the vibrations that connect to us, connect on a level that emotionally heals and repairs our wounded souls. It transcends language and any other barriers we encounter in other walks of life and often provides meaning and emotional engagement that nothing else on earth comes close to
Music is the one human creation that supports and demonstrates, love, communication, is socially connective and emotionally captivating. It side steps all religious and physical territories and serves to connect all that participate in playing or listening.
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Learnt behaviour
One aspect from the current situation that I hear and witness regularly on the TV, on the radio, on Youtube, Podcasts etc, is that we are all having to learn to mange our emotions now. If this pandemic is capable of providing any positives, it is this aspect of our emotional health that is being tested, daily, if not hourly, and that finding a coping strategy is crucial to not only our existence but to our evolution. The unconscious shift in our behaviour is causing us to ‘act out’ our un-dealt with stuff on those closest to us and in ways that we have not ever had to confront before.
The confines of lockdown, the sense of not being able to control this, the conflicting set of regulations, the bombardment from all news providers, the number of people who the have tested positive, the number of people who have died, the restrictions in our usual daily activities – its really holding a magnifying glass over our old set of operational instructions and we desperately need to adapt and engage ‘healthily’ to those closest too us.
Our wellbeing is at stake and we have not been educated to take care of it and ‘exercise’ it regularly. Those of us who have a malady, who have been coping with a long term health issue. Who have a diagnosis and a means to attend to it. We are slightly ahead of the game. We have been on a path of self realisation, to look at some behavioural issues, to evaluate lifestyles, to adapt diets, to instigate fitness plans. We all need to stretch our selves, to flex with the world and learn that how we react and behave is fundamental to where we have come from and what kind of upbringing we’ve had.
We learn our responses to what life deals us from an early age. How we respond to difficult situations is learnt from our formative years, the environment, the demonstrated levels of affection, anger, manipulation, empathy, communication. They are all ‘imprinted’ unconsciously from repeated exposure to the people and places we inhabit. Growing up, this learnt behaviour is either challenged and adapted or enforced. Our stress levels, our ability to express anger properly, our anxiety, our ability to express love properly, our appetite our energy levels, they are all governed by where we have come from and what we have ‘witnesses’ as being normal behaviour.
Our emotional fitness is now being held to task. If we learn to adapt and engage in a new set of exercises, we can change our behaviour, we can learn not to take out our suffering on those nearest and dearest, we can stop our addictions. Go find your truth!
Emotional truth
Yes I’m a musical creator first and foremost, but I have a history of delving into my own stuff that has lead me on a path of discovery to learn about who I am and why I am the way I am and consequently have quite an insight into the human condition. I have no formal certification to verify what I write here, but I have a wealth of understanding in my own emotional truth that I guess gives me a little insight into the many faceted layers of what we have been calling ‘mental health’
Personally I don’t like the term. It has historical connotations that mean different things to different people and usually all pretty negative. The term distinctly removes our everyday life experiences from the emotional spectrum that makes up our human condition. ‘Emotional Wellbeing’ is more of a term that encompasses what we are all starting to understand and with the present situation looming above our heads like a black storm cloud, I thought I’d put myself out there and share some insights with any one who has the patience to read this blog.
The chances are if you’re reading this you have come to my website to see what kind of music I create and to what standard or styles of music I produce. So I hope your expectations were either met or exceeded! But more importantly it’s just your enquiring nature that has prompted you to click here and read what I’m now typing. Firstly, bless you for being that inquisitive and secondly how are you feeling today? Have you had a moment to think about your feelings and how they might be governing your mood? You’re probably also a creative individual so have you thought about how your feelings and emotions might be impacting on your creativity.
I know many creative people who have just stopped creating during the first lockdown. All sense of having something to say or express seemed to leave them. I too had some thunderous wobbles in April and May of this year. Almost existential in terms of trying to grasp the point of doing anything. In fact it was only my amazing family and the want to focus on replacing some old decking in the garden that kept a thin but nevertheless powerful anchor on my emotional heath.
Now I’m someone that has suffered from anxiety allot in my early twenties and that categorically steered me to undertake some Primal therapy in the 90’s. I have ‘worked’ on myself and have accomplished a good degree of insight into what my ‘baggage’ is. No real revelation it has to be said, but a sensitive individual bought up with middle-class not particularly emotionally demonstrative parents and a tendency to overthink everything. There are no real pointers or specific clues as to why this anxiety came to me, but it has carved me a path of enquiry and in time, acceptance to what is me and what kind of person I am.
The Earths pulse!
7.83hz is literally the earths pulse that supports and heals all life on earth. 7.83hz is the low fundamental frequency resonance within the earths electromagnetic field. It is well below the human hearing spectrum so we can’t to hear it, but without it we start to exhibit all kinds of health and wellbeing disorders, so we do need to ‘synchronise’ with this frequency to live well and stay healthy.
Mobile phones, electrical radiation, wifi, and all electrical gizmo’s interfere with our ability to synchronise with this resonance, but being outside, ideally in the countryside away from towns and cities, is where we can benefit from this healing frequency.
Check it out online to read more about it, but for now understand that its has significance for me and calling my studio 7.83hz seemed appropriate to how I view things and that wellbeing is integral to my process but also, that creativity is integral to my wellbeing.
They are linked, massively so in fact and we hugely underestimate the relationship and the functions that these two elements play in keeping us on an even keel, emotionally and creatively and as we head into yet another lockdown I feel it poignant to write about my experiences and share some insights into my understanding of the human condition and how we can ‘manage’ our wellbeing during these intense periods of uncertainty.