The Meandering Mind

Category: Practicing With Prompts

A collection of practice work where inspiration/direction is taken from a prompt.

  • What strategies do you use to cope with negative feelings?

    As someone who has personally struggled with mental health issues for a long time, I am rather glad I came across this writing prompt question. I have tried many different forms of therapy, treatments, and medications, as well as explored various coping skills. I am going to cover some that I have learned about over the years, as well as explain what I like about them. Just a reminder, that this is all just my thoughts and experiences, individual results and experiences may vary.

    Journaling

    My top way to cope with negative feelings and thoughts is journaling. There are many videos on YouTube that talk about different ways to do it, but the number one way to journal is to just do it. When I first started journaling, I was lost in depression and anxiety desperately wanting some kind of release for the pain that I was feeling. My therapist at the time suggested I try it; I was skeptical and couldn’t comprehend how writing down what I was feeling would help me. I asked him what I am supposed to write about, he just shrugged his shoulders and said, “whatever you want to”. Being in the state of mind that I was at the time I essentially scoffed at him and told him how ridiculous it sounded. If I sit down and write about my problems and how I am feeling it is just going to make it worse, and on top of that I am just going to waste time that I could be using for something to improve my life. I needed more direction. I wanted him to tell me the magic things I needed to write. But to my dismay he just kept telling me to write about anything.

    Leaving my therapist’s office, I kept thinking to myself how stupid it sounds to just sit and write about anything and how that’s going to magically make me feel better. But I was willing to give it a try, and on my way home I swung by the store and bought a journal as well as a pack of pens. The first step was complete. I am not saying you should go out and buy a special notebook and special pens just to start journaling. You can start with any writing utensil and paper. The first few times I wrote in my journal I merely wrote how dumb I think it is, what I am upset about, and how I don’t see the way writing about it is going to help. Yet day after day I kept adding to it. Then one day I realized that I had just written four pages. I started with how I was feeling. Then what thoughts I was having about the way I was feeling. What had happened that day to trigger these thoughts and feelings. What I could have done differently, and lastly that it was normal for me to feel the way I was feeling and reminded myself that tomorrow is always a new day.

    Now all of these years later I love to journal. Somedays I will only sit down at the end of the day and write about things I did that day, or merely just write that it was a good day. I am human, on occasion over the years I have gone days, weeks, and at one point months without journaling. I find myself “slipping” emotionally when I haven’t been journaling. It’s almost like I begin reverting back to having the inability to cope with regular everyday stressors. These days I find myself journaling about everything, and after watching a YouTube video about journaling like a philosopher I now have two active journals. The first one goes with me everywhere. It is the one that I write down my to-do list for every day and make notes about things I need to remember. I write down quotes I hear, random thoughts that cross my mind, and even things people recommend I check out. The other is the one that I write in nightly to reflect on my day, record different things that stand out to me, and share my deepest thoughts and feelings. The first one has things in it that if others saw I would not be bothered, but the second has all the things that I have no intentions of ever showing another person and hope another person never reads it. Not because there is anything troublesome in it, but because it is my inner most thoughts and feelings. It is a safe space to vent, that is its whole purpose.

    Journaling is the first way to cope that I wanted to cover because in my opinion it is the most effective. I feel it is the most effective because I can go back and read where I have been in life. I can easily reflect and see just how much I have grown. The more I read my own journal entries and think back through those issues, reading about what I did after and how it helped or didn’t help allows me to really learn from my past without relying on just mental memories that can be distorted. Then I am able to remember how I coped in situations when they arise again. Thats why I think journaling is the best, when used properly it can facilitate tremendous growth in a short period of time.

    Meditation

    My second favorite coping skill is meditation. I know what you are thinking, “ugh. how is sitting in silence supposed to help you cope?” Well firstly you don’t have to be sitting in silence to meditate. Secondly it doesn’t even require you to be sitting. Meditation at its root is just the practice of controlling your own mind.

    In the world today most people are bombarded with stimulation from the second they wake up in the morning until they shut their eyes at night. Then, if they are like me, Sir David Attenborough continues narrating life on the African plains until Netflix gets tired of asking “Are you still watching?” All of the constant stimulation cannot be good for our mental health, I am not sure if there have been studies on this or not. While the answer is more than likely just a Google search away, I will leave confirming that for another time. Maybe I will do a more in-depth article on the effects of meditation. Any ways back on track, sorry ADHD moment there.

    Being bombarded with so much stimulus doesn’t give me much time to truly process my thoughts and emotions. All day long my mind is constantly jumping from thought to thought, my emotions go back and forth. The smallest things can trigger an avalanche of emotion. I struggled to stop it for a long time, I felt I had no control over my thoughts and emotions. Meditation is practicing controlling your thoughts, once I learned to control my thoughts better the ability to control my emotions began to follow. I am not sure if this is something everyone who meditates experiences or if it was just my experience.

    I tried meditating for a while before I finally figured out the way that worked best for me. Starting out I was taking a pillow and setting it on the ground, sitting on top of it while crossing my legs, and then not think about anything. That just did not work for me, number one I have destroyed my body over the years and sitting in that position starts to hurt fast, and number two the silence would cause me more anxiety at that time. Normally that would have been enough for me to just give it up, but I wanted it to be something that worked for me. In my mind I had to just be doing it wrong, I had heard of so many people saying how they benefited from it, then you have religions like Buddhism that almost entirely center around meditation.

    Years ago, I came across a video on YouTube of an interview with a Monk named Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche (See video here). The way he describes giving “Monkey Mind” a job just clicked with me. I don’t need to stop my thoughts; I just need to redirect them. So that was one problem I had with mediation solved, but what about the anxiety caused by sitting in silence?

    Well, that is another problem that was solved by the great YouTube. Singing bowls. Yes, you read that right, singing bowls. Used by Buddhist during their meditation the bowls depending on size and material emit different frequencies of sounds. The different frequencies are supposed to have various benefits. Meditating with these various frequencies solved the issue of silence induced anxiety. Over time of meditating with YouTube videos of these different frequencies playing I began to learn to meditate in any noise. Now when I feel myself needing to cope with some unexpected stress or emotion I can stop, briefly meditate and refocus, then carry on. I still find myself every couple of weeks needing to sit and meditate with the singing bowls playing in the background. But that’s just proof every now and then it doesn’t hurt to go back to the basics.

    Hobbies

    A big part of being able to cope with negative feelings for me is my hobbies. I often find my negative feelings stemming from a feeling of lack of control over my own life. I start to feel like I am doing things because I have to, my hobbies stop those feelings. For the past decade I have been teaching myself to play the guitar. Can I play you a song you know? No. Can I tell you all of the notes in the pentatonic scale? Also no. I am not even sure if I spelled pentatonic correctly, but spell-check didn’t flag it, so I assume I did. Yet I keep playing my guitar because it makes mee feel good when I am messing around and put something together that sounds half decent.

    Another hobby of mine that I find myself only really using when I am really struggling to process negative feelings is art. I have different sketch books full of doodles and drawings. Some are complete, some aren’t, and that is ok to me. I am not drawing in an attempt to make a living as an artist, I draw because sometimes I am not sure exactly what I am feeling. When I start drawing and let things just kind of flow out of me, I begin to notice where my mind is. At that point I can stop and journal about where my thoughts and feelings truly are to fully process them.

    There are various hobbies that I dabble in, and I think everyone should have multiple. I am always trying new hobbies because it allows me to feel more in control of my life. It is almost like my way of reminding myself that we have the ability to be new every day, and every day you can choose to do something different.

    Nature

    The warmth of the sunshine on my skin, the freshness of the air in my nose, the sounds of the birds in my ears, I love being outside. No, just going outside isn’t going to make your negative feelings go away. I found out that when I go outside in a bad mood the sun is just too hot, something smells bad, and those birds just need to shut up and quit being so happy. I need to go outside with the mindset that I am going to find the good. I remind myself that it is a good thing the sun is shining, I wouldn’t want to be walking in the rain. It doesn’t smell bad all the time; it’s just a temporary smell right now because that old beat-up truck just passed by. The birds are happy because they are free just like me.

    Getting outside and going for a walk has been recommended by everyone from ancient philosophers to modern doctors, and I am here to recommend it as well. I find getting outside and walking around with no other intention than merely observing the world around me. I look at the plants, I watch the animals, I check for signs that animals were there, I watch the cars, I pay attention to the direction the wind is coming from, what the sky looks like. It is ok to still be a kid at heart and pick up rocks to just say wow this is a cool looking rock before dropping it back on the ground.

    These are the coping skills that are at the top of my list if someone asks me what I do. There are so many different ways to deal with negative emotions, and I personally believe that even if one doesn’t seem to work for you right away try it a few times. Find out about different ways of doing something, and experiment. We are the only ones who can find what works for us, there is no magic coping skill that works for everyone. Sometimes all it takes is having a different person explain how to use a coping skill. Also, much like medications, sometimes it isn’t just one type of coping skill that we need, sometimes we need to find ourselves a little coping skill cocktail. I hope that this helps and thank you for reading until the end!

  • What is the purpose of suffering?

    By nature, I am an inquisitive person, I want to know how things work, what different religions believe, what made the great men in history so great. I spend my time reading everything from Ancient Philosophy to newly released books covering current events and people. Something that is discussed often in the books I have read is suffering. It is something that has existed since the beginning of time. When you stop and think about it all life in this universe seems to go through some kind of suffering. Let me expand on that a little. Would you not consider a long hot summer drought to cause suffering to the plants? Does a mudslide off the side of the mountain and into a stream not cause the fish to suffer that are merely trying to navigate and feed in the now murky water? Therefore, I believe suffering comes in all forms, and it can be felt by every living thing in some shape or form.

    From my experiences throughout life, I believe there is balance in the universe. We have up and its opposite down. There is cold and hot, light and dark, good and bad, fact and fiction. There has to be an opposite force to counteract everything. With that being said I also believe there are levels to all of those things. For instance, you have luke warm water, it is not hot, but it isn’t cold either. There are different amounts of light put out by each light producing source in the universe. There are different levels to anger, happiness, and sadness. In our own feelings we have fluctuations, and opposites to each feeling. If we can find this kind of balance in many other instances throughout the entire universe, then can we not use reason to conclude that suffering would also come in fluctuations and opposite to things like success? With that logic would it not be safe to say that the purpose of suffering is to give reference and serve as an opposite to thriving?

    I feel that suffering offers the same for our soul that a rainy day does for the flowers that grow and blossom in the sunshine that follows. It makes us realize how beautiful thriving is. When it is raining outside, I am sure there is a part of all of us that are glad the rain has come. It makes the grass turn green and the air smells fresher. That first day of rain is amazing, sitting on the porch listing to it bounce off of everything is one of my all-time favorite parts of life. Yet after a few days of rain, I am ready for it to stop and wishing for the sunshine to return. Going through struggles and suffering is a way for our spirits grow. While rain makes the flowers grow, too much rain will hurt them; the same applies to us and struggles. When people go through struggles, they often come out the other side hardened much like steel when it’s been put to the fire and then quenched. Even though the hardened steel is often made into a weapon, so is the mind hardened by suffering. A person who has suffered is often more aware not only of their surroundings but of their current situation. This allows them to be more resilient when facing adverse conditions in the future.

    I supposed my short answer to the question is the purpose of suffering is to show us we have the ability to push through and survive any conditions. It’s there to teach us that as long as we have a heart beating in our chests then we can make it to better days. Most importantly I supposed is that it gives us something to compare thriving to.

  • What is the biggest challenge you will face in the next six months?

    For myself I believe that the biggest challenge most of us will face over the next six months is the same. The biggest challenge is to stick to the changes that we wish to make in life. For me, I always can dream big and think of different places in the world I would like to be. Yet I still find myself mindlessly scrolling through social media or YouTube videos. Not doing anything to achieve these dreams. Just wasting my time watching other people pursue their dreams and tell me how to pursue my own. While it is often important, in my own opinion, to find inspiration and input from people who have traveled the road you are wanting to travel. But you can’t allow the search for answers consume all of the time you have to chase this dream of yours. One thing I have found in life is that sometimes the best thing you can do is throw caution to the wind and jump into something feet first. Just go out on a limb and pursue your crazy dream when it first comes to mind.

    Now I am in no way, shape, or form advocating for you to blindly quit your job and chase your dream of being an underwater basket weaver. What I am saying is once you develop the dream take some time to research what all is needed for this dream to come to fruition. Then once you have a basic understanding take it another step. Start the process of making this dream reality. For instance, I have considered writing professionally multiple times throughout my life. Yet, I never took any steps towards making it a reality. I just automatically assumed that to be a writer you had to come from some kind of specific background, or that it was something you just knew you were going to be from a young age. It also didn’t help that my parents would tell me that writers actually have full time jobs. Yes, that is true, some writers do have full time jobs. But much like other professions you have to start somewhere. There are writers who still hold full time jobs no matter how successful their writing becomes because writing for them is just a hobby they are passionate about. Then you have people who want to write professionally but only get to do it as a hobby because they just aren’t very good, or they haven’t taken the risks required to get their work out there. I would like writing to become my career, I hope that my skills are good enough to gain some recognition and find an audience that enjoys it enough I can do it full time. The freedom to come and go from places as I please, the opportunity to get paid for the knowledge I have, and to have my thoughts on topics seen by the masses drives me to want to do this.

    Like most other new endeavors, it is going to take a conscious effort to make this grow into something I can be proud of. The next six months will really show how dedicated I am to this, and if this is truly something I want to do. If by the end of this six months I have lost interest it will be obvious. Now I know that at the end of six months I won’t likely be able to quit my day job and focus only on this but if there manages to be a rising trend in views coming to the site and I am continually finding things to write about then I will gladly continue to do what it is I am doing here. I hope if you have read this and would like to see more, please leave a comment or a like. Thank you, I hope you have a fantastic day! Keep chasing your dreams!