I saw a phrase in somebody’s sweatshirt on a TV show this week that read “we are the things we have lost” and I had to ponder this for a while to grasp its profundity. After searching the phrase I came across a film of the same name and multiple quotes following similar themes:
Aggression has had some bad press over the last few years and rightly so. Aggression can be a significant factor in violence, assault and murder. It can cause harm both verbal and physical in many ways. However, we must bear in mind that aggression has the potential for good as well.
I want to address those of you who seem to be doing everything right and yet still feel down, depressed, anxious or just not reaching your full potential. Many of you will be productive with your time, eat healthily, exercise regularly, meditate, read and generally do everything you believe is required to be healthy in body and mind.
Carl Jung said “everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. If an inferiority is conscious, one always has a chance to correct it” (3). Our shadow sides are those parts of us that we are most frightened to confront. It’s that traumatic event in our past that we store away in a locked cupboard in the dusty attic of our minds. However the contents of that cupboard do not simply gather dust like old records, but they fester, they grow wounds that infect the cupboard and eventually after years of rejection the attic falls through the house.
The issues we face in the West with regards to mental health significantly stem from a culture that promotes individualism and materialism to a species that is communal and spiritual (2). We expect to find happiness, fulfilment and meaning in thinking purely about ourselves, in promoting ourselves online in fabricated ways and in buying stuff.
Never fear being unoriginal. Many fail to pursue creative endeavours for fear of being unoriginal.
Would you rather go to sleep feeling a sense of relief at the end of a long, arduous day in which you were extremely irritable and frustrated because everything seemed to be working against you ? Or would you rather go to sleep feeling a sense of relief at the end of a long, arduous day in which you did not let external events and people rule your day, in which you didn’t react to anything with hostility but instead embraced everything as it arrived, thanking your lucky stars for your good health and good life?
We must continually be questioning our beliefs and behaviours, especially long-held ones. When we stand too firm, we miss potential blind spots in our thinking. When we are young and our minds are changing rapidly we learn what beliefs and behaviours to embrace in many ways through connotation and association.
There is a significant amount of counterintuitive aspects to life. Aspects in which what is beneficial to us seems, on the surface, to be detrimental. We must therefore fight our problematic thinking. For instance, when we exercise, if a biologist was to look at various bio-markers and your physiology without the knowledge that you’re exercising, they would assume you were dying. However, we know that exercise is extremely beneficial.
We must come to terms with the fact that we will not be fully satisfied with instant pleasure. Pleasures like fast food at the touch of button delivered to your door with the only effort required being the walk from the couch to the front door, social media in which entertainment and novelty is provided in abundance just by swiping your finger on a screen, binge-watching television, pornography and ‘hook-ups,’ shopping in which a reward is only a click away. All of these pleasures can be rewarding and used in moderation but the problem is that we expect the reward before we’ve put in any work.