A little bit of this and a little bit of that

So, I am doing well. I am once again in a state of interior balance. At least for this moment. I had a rough couple of weeks following my trip to Europe. Coming back to the states, as previous posts can attest, was a rough time for me. I went through another little mini-depression after my 24 hour mountain bike race but I knew that would happen. It was a tough physical and mental challenge and quite draining. It is pretty typical for me, when I push my body to some physical limit, to have a three to four day physical recovery that also leaves me mentally floundering, unable to make my normal intuitive connections, and emotionally down.

I found something helpful in both cases, to not judge the depressions. Even admitting that I was depressed was helpful. Naming it and being okay with it was very freeing. Typically, when I become depressed I try to hide it from myself and others. I will say I am sad and grumpy and tired and I will try to treat each thing in a vacuum, as if it were not connected to some greater whole. And typically I will try to analyze the reasons for my sadness and look at it from every angle. These last two depressions I just allowed myself to be depressed. I didn't analyze why I was depressed, part of that being that the reasons for my depression were obvious, and I didn't get angry at myself for being depressed. I was just depressed and I kind of rode out all the sucky things that come with that like a short temper, unhealthy eating and a tendency to look at the negative in things. And that was all okay.

Usually I exacerbate my own depression by getting angry at myself for being depressed. Didn't really happen this time. I also have a tendency to use my depressed attitude as the lenses through which I view my entire world, past, present and future. Again, making my depression worse by clouding everything I look at. And again, I did not do that. What I did do is to look at each present moment and acknowledge both the good and bad and make a choice, albeit somewhat unconscious choice, but a choice nonetheless, to focus on the bad. For example, when I first came back from Europe I was focusing on how awful traffic is and how no one has good conversations while still being able to see that living in AZ affords me unlimited, world class mountain biking and I have built up a good stable of friends with whom I can have good conversations.

All of the strategies I talk about above come from bringing my attention to the present moment. In the present moment I realize that I am only depressed now, I see the good and bad in things, I understand that I am still okay and beautiful if I am sad and depressed, and I know in my soul that the world is unfolding just the way it should (b/c it is the only way it can). And using this wisdom I am able to relax, not get so worked up and loe and behold, my depressions are much less severe (post Europe excepted) and tend to dissipate much more quickly.

And now, after a weekend of working on focusing on the present moment I now feel nice and relaxed. Not relaxed in a physically slothful kind of way, for me the word "relaxed" means that my emotions are in a balanced place and I am accepting of myself, others and the universe. It means that I am focusing on the beauty in each moment and making choices consciously in the moment. My caveat is to say that I am human and the moments in which I can live this healthy attitude are limited by my personality always looking for love and acceptance. And that is okay because love and acceptance are important and my personality is important. My personality has unlimited gifts to give to the world. So the struggle is between focusing my attention on the moment to bring myself internal emotional balance versus my personality diverting my attention outside myself and the moment to create strategies to gain love and acceptance, strategies which, if focus into the moment, can be quite creative and positive.

Another piece of wisdom that has helped me is an acknowledgement, in my mind, heart and soul, that there is a good and evil to everyone and everything. That we all have the capacity for the greatest good and the greatest evil in our hands. Most of us end up somewhere smack in the middle, working our best to gain love and acceptance from those around us. So in small ways we each end up representing that good and evil. It is not a judgement, I do not judge "good" as good and "evil" as bad, it is more an observation. Good for me means creative and evil means destructive. (I am sure someone could poke a bunch of holes in that one) Anyway, when I realized that I am both good and evil and everyone and everything is both good and evil it made me realize that I have a choice in what part of others and the world I will look at. I can choose to look at the beauty in a moment or choose to look at the ugliness in a moment. But that only happens when I am in focused in the moment.

Tying into that I also believe that we each make decisions in the moment for what we believe is best for us and those around us. The reasons we use may come from places of extreme dysfunction and selfishness or from places of the highest order of good and holiness. For most of us the come from somewhere in the middle, a combination of selflessness and selfishness. For me knowing that each of us is doing what we think is best in the moment helps me to be less judgemental. Try it sometime. Next time someone really pisses you off try thinking to yourself "I bet they were just trying to do what they thought was right in the moment, even if I cannot understand the reasons they made that decision, even if it hurt me, maybe, just maybe, they were doing it because they had some reason they thought was the right one for them."

Ahh, the difficulty in writing about soul matters is that my thoughts are limited by my ability to type and my energy to keep writing. There is so much above that I have written that needs explaining. So much that has more background to it then what I write. All I can boil it down to is that we all have beauty, the universe is beauty, and in choosing to focus on the moment I can choose to focus on the beauty. Doing that brings balance to my soul.