This is a powerful speech at Danny Frawley’s Funeral today in Melbourne Australia by Wayne Schwass. See previous blog entry for more details of who Danny was.
Men need to have the courage to speak up and ask for help when something deep inside is not okay. Rather than being strong and covering up, be courageous and open up. Get help.
“Manning up in the past was to suffer in silence, manning up now is to put your hand up.”
(Danny Frawley, AFL Football Great/Coach, 2019)
Danny Frawley died in a car crash hitting a tree last Monday afternoon. He was only 56. The whole Australian AFL football world was in shock that this great man had died.
He was the second longest serving captain ever of the St.Kilda football club – the club that I follow – so I remember his playing days well. He also did some good things in his coaching days and then was a great host and commentator in the media, radio and TV. He was a great leader and inspired many. He was much loved by all.
Danny had major depression issues over the last ten years. He was one of the first men in football to go public with his mental health issues. Having them splashed across the newspapers would not have been easy. This was such a brave thing to do for a celebrity and for a man so much in the public eye of the australian football world.
I am hoping his legacy will have a wide reaching effect on all men, to stop playing tough and pretending ‘she’ll be right mate’ and be brave and courageous enough to speak up and ask for help without feeling it is a sign of weakness. In fact it is a sign of great courage.
It takes great courage to face your demons. It takes men even greater courage to do that, because of cultural conditioning growing up. I believe it is the beginning of a death sentence when a man decided to completely suppress his real feelings in order to be or look strong. This is just not healthy whatsoever. Blocking off feelings reduces your life span.
It takes great courage to face what you have going on within you. I see this regularly with new clients, coming in shaking and scared at what will be revealed. I was the same. Having been through it myself, most are able to calm down fairly quickly and begin the deep inner process.
Looking back at all the sessions I had over the years, I would often be sitting in the waiting area terrified at what I was likely to show to the therapist which had never been safe to show ever before in my life, even to myself. This type of courage leads to freedom and greater health in your life. It’s not easy, but it is worth it.
Doing a regular Body Mindfulness meditation practice means you will have to go within and eventually face some of your old traumas and demons that you could not face in the past. Don’t give up when uncomfortable feelings arise. Just take a smaller piece, whatever is manageable and face that. Do that regularly and you will progress further than ever before. You will thrive.
“The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion that is not fully faced, accepted and then let go of, join together to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body.”
(Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth, 2005)
Last week I quoted from Eckhart’s book that preceded The Power of Now. This week the quote is from the book that followed The Power of Now.
Everyone will have events in their lives where there are strong negative emotions that are hard to deal with. People find ways to cope with such events.
But coping is not healing and at some point those negative emotions need to be dealt with and released. If not, as Tolle says, they accumulate and join together to form tensions, pressures, pains, muscular restrictions, energy drains, limitations, stiffness, and then later, affect our thinking creating anxiety, depression and if still not dealt with, much worse, disease and even serious injury.
The good news is that you can do something about it for yourself by mindfully connecting to your body on a regular basis. Taking time to connect within allows you to contact the cells that are carrying that built up negative emotion.
By switching off distracting thoughts you open an inner door way within your body that allows you access to the community of cells that make up the different parts of your body. This crucial connection allows for a lot of self healing that scientists and doctors are still coming to grips with.
Learning to connect within, gives you unprecedented access to your physical vehicle as well as your past unprocessed emotions and traumas. Facing this past material is not always easy but it is worth the resulting freedom, reduced drama and enhanced health that is waiting on the other side of that old hidden pain.
This can be difficult to believe if you have been brought up thinking you have to always take something when you are unwell.
But if you learn how to face something now,
you most likely won’t have to take something later.
“It wasn’t considered professionally respectable to investigate connections between the brain – the province of neuroscience – and the immune system – the province of immunology.”
(Edward Bullmore, PhD, The Inflamed Mind – A radical new Approach to Depression, 2018)
I’m fascinated how the immune system and the nervous system interact. How inflammation in the body when the immune system is low can affect and even create mental symptoms like depression. And also going the other way, how negative depressive thinking can weaken the immune system and cause inflammation in the body. The research is finally beginning to show this link.
My personal and client experiences over the years informed me directly that the mind and body affect each other quite strongly. Of course western scientific medicine has denied this for hundreds of years thanks to 17th century Descartes dualist ideas that the mind and body were totally separate.
So it was nice to read from a psychiatrist (Edward Bullmore) that ‘a lot of what I was taught in medical school is wrong’.
Edward is part of a small group of psychiatrists that call themselves neuro-immunologists. He is pioneering a new field of research that links the brain, the body and the immune system. So we can look forward to much better treatments that deal with the mental and physical health issues together, rather than apart as they are currently done within western medicine.
I realised decades ago in my practice that western medicine was way behind in this mind body connection and so I let them go and continued independently, continually researching and applying new techniques that made this mind body link stronger and stronger within me and within my clients.
Making this link stronger is what body mindfulness meditation is all about too. Just by strengthening and feeling into this link in your body, your body automatically begins to heal, and you don’t need to know how it is doing it. It just happens – when you get out of the way.
My personal research and development continues to this day and there are more exciting breakthroughs to come again soon. And again, like thirty years ago, it is going to look completely alternative and ‘bonkers’ to western mainstream medicine, until they catch up again – eventually 🙂
I was alarmed by the figures of youth suicide reported in the paper in Melbourne today. 3,128 (aged 15-44) died by suicide in a single year. This is almost three times the amount of deaths from car accidents each year. Every day, there are about 8 suicides and 180 attempts. So that means that there are 68,620 suicide attempts each year. That is a lot of pain and angst that people have within them which they do not know how to resolve and heal in a healthy way.
Such pain points to a massive disconnect within themselves and with those around them. This leads to a lot of trapped emotion in the body. If this build up isn’t released in a healthy way, the pain can reach levels where the only way out logically seems to be to kill oneself.
What’s also concerning is that many times, families and work colleagues do not see it coming. So what can you do?
Internally – a mindfulness practice is critical to connect you within yourself to create an outlet for this trapped emotional pain.
Externally – making more meaningful connections with your loved ones is critical. Don’t always assume they are okay just because they are not saying anything. One way to facilitate this is to ask people you care about meaningful questions and ask them often.
I’ll give some examples here but what is important to note is the state you are in when you ask them. You slow down, become mindful, connect within yourself first, and then ask the questions slowly, with a lot of care and then wait, giving the person a lot of time and space to answer. The person must feel safe to go a little deeper than normal. Going deeper requires more time otherwise you’ll just get a shallow response.
Questions:
What’s been on your mind that you think would be difficult to talk about?
What makes you sad about yourself? Sad about the world?
What do you wish you were able to do better, if it were possible?
What makes you angry about yourself? About the world?
When was the last time you got scared or a big fright?
What scares you about yourself? About the world?
The last class for 2018 is running tomorrow night. The Mindfulness classes will resume again on Tuesday Jan 15th 2019. So a shorter break than other years. 2019 will make it 9 consecutive years running of this class and as is tradition, the first class will be free for whoever books in until full.
I’m reading (technically listening to) a great book titled Lost Connections by Johann Hari. Where he covers the real causes of depression in most people. And the research all points to lost connections. For example, we have lost connections with:
* People – today we have fewer friends we can confide in,
* Work – more people doing less meaningful work,
* Childhood Trauma – people are not taking the time to go within and complete their past trauma to reconnect with themselves,
* Natural World – we are losing the natural organic rhythms of nature that we use to have centuries ago.
I recommend this book highly. It’s a damning indictment on trying to solve depression with prescription drugs.
A Body Mindfulness meditative practice helps you to reconnect with your real self. I’ve found that when you reconnect to yourself within – your body – you then naturally want to reconnect to other (better) people, spend more time in nature, do more meaningful work, eat better etc.
Coming home and reconnecting to you is the first biggest crucial step to eradicating depression. And this time of year is when it usually hits the hardest. I will be on leave for 2.5 weeks from Dec 21st (returning Jan 7th 2019) but I will still be able to see some people for individual sessions (in person or from anywhere in the world over Skype/Zoom) should you really need help with that inner connection over the Xmas/New Year break.