Mental Health

Although there is, understandably, a worldwide mental health crisis, there is also a move for some toward greater mental sanity. There are those who, in times of stress, get clear on priorities and refuse to indulge mad thoughts. They might realize that madness is a luxury they cannot afford and that they will only get through a crisis by using their attention as wisely as possible, choosing calm in the midst of chaos.

Transcript

Welcome to In the Deep. I'm your host, Katherine Ingram. The following was excerpted from a Zoom session of Dharma Dialogues, Which was broadcast from Australia on August 1st, 2020. It's called Mental Health. Consequent to the many, Many crises that are happening on planet Earth, There's a global mental health crisis. You've probably heard about it. People are anxious and depressed, And there's huge waves of fear going around, Even among people who are not necessarily struggling with a depression or even extreme anxiety, But just general fear because things are so uncertain in every way. The certainties we have are all kind of bleak. There are certainties we're facing that are bleak. Naturally, There's a lot of fear, A lot of fear waving around. But I've been reflecting on quite a lot actually on the, First of all, I've spoken about this quite a bit, The disparity between what we have come to expect of life and how it is now. We're a bit handicapped by how privileged we've been. We've gotten a bit soft in our expectations of a certain type of life and certain types of options, Which were many, Many, Many and which now are few in terms of the way that we had options before, Especially the options of movement and travel and having adventures. Our adventures have to be a lot more quiet and a lot more local and perhaps a lot more internal. So I recently, As one does in this period, I've been watching a lot of great movies and dramas and series and so on. And I've been visiting some films that I liked at the time I saw them a long time ago, But had not seen them since. There's certain films I've watched a number of times, But there are others that I liked okay and haven't seen since, For decades. And one such film was The English Patient, Which I just watched recently. And it was better than I had remembered it. Really an incredible all-star cast. And at a time when they were young, Kristen Scott Thomas and Ralph Fiennes and Colin Firth and Julia Benosch and so on. Anyway, This story, As many of you probably know, And I'm not going to spoil it for you who haven't seen it, But the story is set, It takes place in, It goes back and forth in time. And the time frame is not so very much. It's basically pre-war and during the World War II and then a bit post-war, In fact, The kind of cleanup phase just in the days of the aftermath of the war. And even though this is just a fictional account, One senses that not only was that realistic, The depiction of how life had to carry on and people still fell in love and people still made sacrifices and helped each other. And some people were incredibly cruel and selfish and awful and all of it happening as life does, Even in terrible times. And it was just a beautiful reminder actually of how strong we are, How much metal of strength we actually do have. And so I want to offer this evening, This evening here, Looks like many of you are in your mourning, As a reminder, This simple reminder that people have endured all kinds of hardships. For many of us on this call, If we'd been born even 100 years ago, Chances are we would be dead by this age. Now, Some of you are young, I see, But for many of us, We're living longer. We've already been living longer than most people did in history. And in most of history, Life was incredibly precarious, Even if it wasn't that you died at what was considered an old age in those days, Which was what we would consider very much middle age. But life was tough in every other way. It was a struggle for many, Many people. And as we know, That's the case for many people on earth today. They're not tortured by this disparity of all their options. Their lives are hard and they're continuing to be hard. But they've been making do. And they've been showing incredible inner resilience and courage and cooperation in order to just live, Just to exist. So I really want us to remember when you're going into your mental stories of, This is not how we're supposed to be living. My life had a whole different trajectory, A whole different plan, And now it's not happening and something's horribly wrong. Well, This is what is. This is what we've got. And you're living in your strongest, Clearest, Most courageous space is a great gift to yourself. And it's also an incredible gift to everyone around you, All the people who love you and all the people you love. This is your job now. Someone wrote to me the other day, She's in Portland. And I'm sure you've heard that Portland's been, I think they're on day 60 or something of social unrest and riots and federal armed forces in there who've now left. But it's a time of incredible upheaval in that particular city. Not the only one, But. And they're there in Portland. She's in a mixed race relationship. She's a white girl and her husband is an African American. And so that has an added tension for them when they go out and about. There's just a lot of fear in her life. She's someone who's been attending my sessions. I used to live in Portland a long time ago and starting in about 1995, She was attending my sessions there. And many times I've gone back just to teach a series. And so she's always attended those. And she wrote to me the other day and she said, I've never asked you a question. I've never written to you with a question, But I need your help now. And so she laid out her extreme anxiety that she's feeling, Her extreme worry. And I wrote back that because I know her and because I know her work, Which is beautiful work in the world and always about helping others, I wrote back and said, You've been being readied for this for a long time. You're a strong woman. This is what you've been being readied for. So it is also the case for us. All of the inner reflections, The philosophical reflections, The ways that we've celebrated love, The things we've shared, The deep, Deep things we've shared, Those things that we honor in our lives, Those things that are important to us. This is the time for the harvest of that. So no need to fall down on anything. Because of this wave of depression that goes around, It can be catchy. It can be you can be thinking, Oh, I'm depressed too. Somebody tells you how awful it feels and how worried they are. You start thinking, Yeah, Me too. Right. It's catchy. But what's also catchy is strength and courage and carrying on and kindness. That's also catchy. I wanted to say that you were saying that as things go on, People feeling depressed and angry and worried and fearful, I find it quite the opposite. I do feel like that character in the movie we've talked about before, Melancholia, That as things become more and more clear and inevitable and there are fewer choices, I find it much easier and clearer and lighter. Part of it, I think, Is because the kind of gaslighting that we've had from society is really becoming less and less, Actually. If you think about the COVID crisis in Australia, Everywhere that virus is going has been a long term festering problem in Australian society, Such as precarious work and people in aged care homes and the problem with hospital settings and all these sorts of things are kind of really revealed actually by the virus. The underlying inevitability of climate change and ecological collapse. So somehow I find myself feeling cheerier and whistling cheerily to myself and finding the lies that society tells itself to keep going are being made more and more transparent. The virus is teaching us to live more in the moment and more focusing on what really matters to us and that's connection to other people and to the planet, To the animals, To the land. So I find myself, As it goes on, Getting cheerier. Getting what? Cheerier. More cheery. Cheery. Okay. Uh-huh. Yeah. Kind of bizarre. So I mean, I'm starting to think maybe some people around me think that I'm a bit of a lunatic in that sense that the main character in Melancholia is. I mean, I'm not going out, You know, Naked down the street in the middle of the night like she does. But, You know, I definitely feel myself going in a bit of a sort of a counter direction without diminishing the pain and the suffering and the deep distress, You know, That people are facing. You know, I have friends in India that are just really up against it right now. And just realizing, Yeah, It's right. We've had this insanely privileged middle class existence for all these years and I'm thinking, Damn, You know, I never got to go to Catalonia. Wow, Why didn't I spend more time in Turkey? And, You know, But they kind of like lost regrets and they are kind of, You know, First world problems. So, You know, I find myself focusing much more on connection to others and support and creating communities and all those things that, Let's face it, We should be doing all the time anyway, Right? Yes. Yeah. So I don't really have a question more just a kind of an observation. And so if you read in the paper, You know, Some woman prancing around the streets of Hobart in the nude, Singing cheerily to herself, Then you'll know who it is. We'll know who it is. Well, I love everything you just said, And I agree. There's a way that things that we're having to pretend about, We're not having to pretend about anymore, Right? That there's a kind of, There was this collective hallucination that we in the Western societies have been living in for a long time. And the veil is being peeled off of that for sure. And so we don't have the burden of pretending, You know, And having to keep up the facade. As you were speaking, Though, I wanted to say to you, Because you are in a kind of au fait place with this, You will be very, Very helpful for others. So as you were speaking, I couldn't help but notice that just as in the movie, You know, She ended up being the one who could see what was happening and the truth of everything. She ended up being the strong one, Right? She had been processing the information for a lot longer. And that has a great advantage. So yes, There's a time for our, As I said, That we've been being readied. Part of our being readied, As those who love Dharma, Is that we have a relationship to suffering, Right? We, As even though we've been privileged, We still have had one eye on the fact that there's a lot of suffering, We each experienced a lot of suffering, We each experienced loss. And we knew all along, We were going to be dying, As unfortunately, A lot of people don't seem to realize that there's the denial of death is, Is a real thing. And so, In your case, Given that you have really looked at these matters, You've looked, You really looked as a, You know, As a professor of political science, For instance, You have also looked at the underbelly of the unjust nature of how things are set up in our modern world, And the disparities of cultures and all those things. You've looked at that very deeply. And now we're looking at a kind of reckoning that's happening, As you're as you're pointing to. So, Here it is, And we're going to need you, We're going to need you, Even if you are running down the streets in Hobart without your clothes on. Thanks, Catherine. Yeah, In a way too, It's like, Going back to the mental illness question, In another way, What's happening, I think is, Is people are becoming so much more authentic, Not in mental illness, But just in mental, In mental sanity, In fact, You know, Where you're not, In any way, Shut down your own ways of finding joy, No matter how crazy they looked. I know you spoke on another one of these sessions about you being a night owl, And that, You know, You felt a little out of step with the rest of the world, Because so many people are, You know, Daybirds. But it's those kinds of reflections that you realize, I don't have one single second to suppress how I actually am, No matter how crazy it may look to others. It isn't crazy to me. And in fact, I'm able to stay much more sane when I am living my actual truth. So definitely full permission for that, Full permission for your joy in any way you find it. Hi, Hi, Catherine. We met, Hi, We met many years ago in Dublin. I do remember your face, I do. Now tell me, Where was I teaching at the time there? Oh goodness, I can't actually remember the venue, But it's a good long time ago. It's over 10 years ago. I don't know when you were last in Dublin, But the time that we met then. So it was a long time ago that I was there. Yeah. So I've been recently listening to the podcasts, Your podcasts, And all through the night as well. I've been going through a difficult few weeks of partying of a relationship and it caused an awful lot of anxiety. So I'm getting great comfort from the podcasts. So I have a few things sort of interrelated that I'll say. One of the things about the pandemic, I have a long-term serious health condition. So it causes me to be on my own an awful lot of the time because I can't do otherwise. I have to rest, I have to pace. I know quite a few people like me. And so funny, The pandemic, Like what you're saying about authenticity and a certain difficult reality that people have to come into, In a way it's reflecting for people who have very serious health conditions and who have had a lot of hardship in a certain way, It's almost reflecting more of a reality. So it's like not being as outside of things. Things have become more accessible online. So if you have a physical disability, It can be very hard to access, To travel, To go to different things. So the world has almost shifted despite the huge tragedy and the impact of that and the overall depression of the suffering that's happening to other people. In certain pockets of things, There is this, For me anyway, There is an increased feeling as of what you're talking about, That of being able to be real about things that were hard to be real about before. So the suffering in the body would be one that's a long-winded way, That's what I'm trying to say. But one of the questions I have is that I do spend a lot of time on my own, But I'm wondering, I feel I need to bring more silence into that, Even though I am spending time on my own, I don't think it's very silent. I'm also an academic and I enjoy that. I've recognized over the years I enjoy it and that's it. I can't give up on my thoughts as such. But do you think it's possible to bring silence without being in a retreat, With being on one's own? I do find it difficult. It is very difficult. And sometimes I wonder about the limits of endurance. Well, When you say bring silence in, I mean, If you live alone, Then I would imagine your space is fairly quiet. But when I speak about silence, It's really a quietness of the heart. And you can have that very easily living alone. That can look like literally like you're washing the dishes and you're just mindfully washing the dishes. That's it. And now you're making your meal maybe and you're chopping your onions and you're noticing all of that and you're smelling the smell of the spray of the onion and you're just moving through space in a kind of quietness of heart. And if you're listening to the radio, You can just be listening to the radio, Right? That's listening to it fairly with the quietness of heart. But if you're noticing that you're listening to something that's starting to agitate you. Now, I don't mean to avoid all news if you're happened to be someone who's interested in the news. I am interested in the news. And I do listen to some portion of my morning, I listen to news just to see what's gone on in the world in the previous time while I was sleeping. And because it's just interesting to me, But there does come a point when I know, Okay, Enough of this, Right? There does come a moment and sometimes I'm a little over the moment. It's a little far gone. Where I'm just noticing this is starting to get really troubling inside. It's just spinning around. So yeah, I don't feel I'm susceptible to missing any big events because I do keep up. But I know also that there comes a point where I'm listening to a lot of things that are terrible and upsetting that I can do nothing about. Nothing whatsoever. And so then I have to ask myself, Okay, How much bearing witness is actually wise? Yeah. I simply see it as my duty to be able to bear as much witness as possible. I used to feel that very, Very strongly. I used to feel that as a journalist and because I was on the boards of some human rights organizations. And one of the things that political prisoners consistently say is that it matters to them that at least someone knows and someone is bearing witness to their problems even if they can't do much about it. It makes all the difference to them to just know that someone knows. And so I used to feel just like you just said, A certain obligation to keep looking at the people jumping off the World Trade Towers or whatever. Every tragedy. Every tragedy. Yes. Yes. Yeah. And now we have quite a lot on offer. And so in a way, Kind of re-infecting the pain inside each and every time. And it gets to a point where I know that not only can I not do anything about any of that, But the things I can do something about might be taxed. I will be taxed internally if I continue down this path of self-inflicting misery. So it's just that balance. It's just knowing limitations, Isn't it, As well? Say again? Knowing your limits of tolerating. Yes. Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I listened to just a little clip of a BBC story. They were actually just advertising the story. It's a series they're doing on these first responders in Karachi. And they just had this one guy they interviewed just very briefly as a kind of preview. This ambulance driver saying there were times there when there were lots of bombings and terror events in Karachi, That every 10 minutes he was going out in his ambulance picking up bodies every 10 minutes through the day and working 18 hours a day. And I was thinking, How, I don't know, Like, I don't know how anyone does that. And he sounded like a very caring person. You know, People are built differently. And you have to be honest about you and about. . . Keeping your own, I always say, Your own wealth filled enough that it spills over. So that means you are keeping your own self as calm as you can and as lighting your own heart in simple, Joyful ways and being kind. And then your life becomes this offering. And your job is simply just keeping it well tuned up. Not in a kind of, You know, Narcissistic way but rather in the way of wanting to be of service. In whatever way that is. Yes, Whatever way that is. And with your own balance, Your own honest balance of all of it. Some people can't handle much, Either psychologically or on their hearts. Like, I do know a lot of people who are so very tender. There's this innocence about them, Like children, You know. And they can't really handle much bad news. And they can't handle knowing about the terrible things that go on in this earth. They just can't handle it. And so, Okay, That's the truth for them. TS Eliot said that people can't handle much reality. Something I can't remember the exact line but. . . Yeah. Yeah. I find what you say about reality hugely comforting because I find there is really no other way for me to have peace than facing it. You know, Facing loss, Facing death. And I can't get away from it because my body is quite restricted. So it's kind of in my face a lot of the time. So yeah, But it's definitely by facing it. Well, I don't feel I have any option, Actually, In my own self. Me too. Which can make me a little bit stark. Yes. I know. Exactly. Believe me, I do know. No, It's, You know, Sometimes you're not, One is not welcome in certain quarters because you're just not willing to pretend that, You know, That everything's just peachy. And you know, So I think it's important though to recognize that this is a world of both sorrow and joy and also mercy. And so one just notices that range and it's just always playing out right in front of us. Every story we hear, You know, It's somewhere on that spectrum. I think it's really giving yourself a break as well, Isn't it, By bringing the attention back away from whatever is the troubling thought. Yes. It feels like giving myself a break. Yeah. Definitely. Yeah. So yeah. Thank you very much. Yes. Yeah. Lovely. Hi, Everybody. Hi. I just wanted to say hello and I just really enjoyed the conversation today. I'm in a very, What do you call it? Yeah. I'm just in a very tender place and they just touched upon, Everybody touched upon this situation that we're in and yeah, I don't really know what to say. I just feel that I feel this split in a way. I feel this longing to wake up fully in this moment. And then part of me kind of realizing, Seeing, Feeling everything, And then the other part existing in what's going on around me and in the conditioning, In a conditioned way. Because around me, I feel that people are not so much expressing their anxiety or their worries a little bit. It's like we can discuss a little bit about what the situation is like, But it's like, Well, Everybody carries on, But in a way like nothing has happened, But they're a little bit fragile and a little bit frazzled, But still going on the way they have been or we have been. And it's, I just feel that split inside part of me kind of still denying death and the other one being quite awake to what's going on. Maybe that's just the human condition in a way. Yeah. I mean, I think having death constantly on your mind would be so debilitating. It'd be almost terrible. It's just too much. And even people who do have terminal illnesses. One of my friends in Melbourne, She died about a year and a half ago. I only met her in the last months of her life. And so the whole time I knew her, She was in a terminal kind of condition. And I was so amazed with how many times she would be laughing, Like we'd be laughing about something, Like really laughing, Or would she just be talking about any old thing. And I was always aware the whole time I was with her, I was always aware of her circumstance. And perhaps I'm sure some portion of her awareness was always reserved for that as well. But she was also living her last days, She was living her last phase here on earth. And that was an incredible gift for me to see that she wasn't just kind of flattened into this, Like staring at an asteroid coming at her. She was sipping the tea and looking at the ducks out on the lake in front of her and just talking and gabbing. And I played her, I turned her on to this album that she really loved. And the two of us, The first time I played it for her, We listened to the entire album in silence, Sitting on two couches near each other. And it was just this really profound experience. She was so there. So yes, It's this razor's edge that we walk here. It was always so. Yeah, That is the living in the time of dying. She was doing that. She was living. Yeah. Yeah, That's right. And I think that's the yearning. And that's the yearning that has been there all the time. But now it's just like, It's just bigger because it's bigger than me and my life. But the yearning is the same. The yearning in the heart kind of is the same. And as you just said, The Dharma, The things we've been talking about, Everything is just even more illumined in a way. And it's always been about that. But yeah, It's just another frame we're seeing it in right now. Yes, Absolutely. That's true. Yes. I know. There's something very strangely exhilarating about all this. Even though tough, But also exhilarating. It's sort of like you used the word about being awake. It's very wakeful. Yeah, You don't just sort of drift off into there's a lot to have the attention here. But still it's like there's one part of me and maybe a lot of other people where it's just moving as it has been moving all along. It's like just doing the same thing and maybe also falling into the same traps and the same condition and everything's just as it ever was. But then there's something else too. And yeah, It's like. . . Yeah, I get up in the morning and the things that I'm doing are, You know, It's definitely Groundhog Day kind of. Making the curtains, Making the spirulina shake, All of that stuff. And yet it's in a context that feels different than it used to feel. It's a very different kind of context at this point, Which has its own stark beauty. Yeah, It does. So good to see you. Yeah, Good to see you. I love this.

Reviews

Very interesting! Thank you!