Challenging Depression & Despair: A Medication-Free, Self-Help Programme That Will Change Your Life (24 page)

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Six: The nature challenge

Whatever the depth of your despair, Nature can reach you and Nature can rescue you.
Even if you normally spend your days in the city and only ever see smoking traffic, brick walls and factory forecourts, your brain will be startled into life by close contact with the green and pleasant land. In fact, if you
do
spend your days like that, your mind has probably been impaired by such unnatural deprivation and you need to get on with this right away.

The following challenge is designed to get you back into normal communion with Nature. You can do this in two ways: first, by going out into the countryside – or parkland or woods or along a beach; and second, by ‘bringing Nature home’ – by gardening. Try both, but you must try at least one.

BIG OPEN SPACES

If you don’t normally wander in forests and fields or by a sea shore, you may find the whole notion rather alien and put up objections as to why you couldn’t possibly do it.

•
 
I can’t afford the fare to get there.
 

•
Those places are lonely and I might get attacked.
 

•
I’m not mobile enough.
 

•
I don’t have time.
 

•
I suffer from allergies, hay fever, etc.
 

•
I’m a townie.
 

•
I don’t have the proper footwear or clothes.
 

•
I’m afraid to go far by myself.
 

•
I find big open spaces threatening.

All of these difficulties can be overcome. If you can’t afford the fare, save on something else that you would regard as a leisure activity, such as smoking, drinking, gambling, comfort-eating or retail therapy. If you are on a pension, you may be entitled to a bus pass that will take you far and wide. If you are afraid you might get attacked, get a life. You are just as likely to get waylaid in a town. Besides you don’t
have
to choose a particularly lonely spot – pick a place where there are plenty of other people enjoying the views. I’ve been walking in forests and fields by day and night all my life with my dogs and I’m still here (though as one trainee commented: ‘Who’d attack her!’).

If you’re not mobile enough, please follow the advice for the fitness challenge. Where there’s a will, there’s a way. ‘I don’t have time’ is an apology for an excuse.
Make
time by using the hour grid and seeing where you can save on time-wasting activities. If you suffer from allergies, get some medical advice. Remember that progressive exposure
de
sensitises and overprotection increases abreaction. We are living in an age where a peanut on the floor can now
clear a school
, so great is our terror of exposure. Unnatural and increasing avoidance of stimuli leads to health dysfunction. In other words, get tough by building up your resistance, and you can start by going out in the fresh air.

‘I’m a townie’ is the sort of thing one generally hears from people who like to stay out all night pubbing and clubbing and who therefore don’t have the energy to get up in the morning. There’s no such thing as ‘the metropolitan personality’. Anyone can be renewed and refreshed by the countryside, rivers, lakes and sea shores. Anyone can buy a pair of wellingtons or walking shoes and a good warm jacket from a charity shop. You are going where Nature intended, not on a catwalk.

‘BARRIER BELIEFS’

The last two objections – ‘I’m afraid to go far by myself’ and ‘I find big open spaces threatening’ – are what are known in the life skills professions as ‘barrier beliefs’. These are beliefs that prevent us from doing what we would like to do because we will not
test
them and we will not
contest
them. Beliefs like this are tyrants that can rule our lives. The way to overcome them is to:

1
question them to see if they are true;

2
get advice on how to challenge them; and

3
challenge them.

Barrier beliefs are not set in stone. People change their beliefs all the time, sometimes slowly, sometimes dramatically (for example by being converted). A lot of beliefs are out of date and based on what happened to us a long time ago. You are more experienced now, so test old beliefs against your new knowledge. Discuss them with people you trust. Challenging a barrier belief is not as hard as you may think. You are free to act as if you held a different belief. So that might make you nervous – so what?

Brain fishing

Our brains are constantly filtering incoming data – otherwise our heads would be a complete jumble. The brain does this using something called the ascending reticular formation (‘reticular’ means like a net). The brain net is set to catch particular fish, and it fishes according to the instructions we have given it.

For example, if you tell it to look out for bits of information that confirm your belief that you are fat, it will pick up and capture any chance remark to do with weight, chubbiness, looking cuddly, etc. that seems to confirm the belief held. It lets through the net what doesn’t conform to that belief. Yet there are thousands of other bits of data coming in that might disprove that belief altogether. These go through the net and are not retained. The brain is a servo-mechanism. It is doing exactly what you have asked it to do.

We are all ‘fishing’ all the time, according to our beliefs. So if you reset your net it will soon be looking for positives instead of negatives. And if you hold barrier beliefs that it is fearful to go far by yourself or that big open spaces are threatening, it’s time to give your brain net some new fishing quotas!

RECORD YOUR EXPERIENCE

Once you get out into those big open spaces, just passively
being there
may do you the world of good. People who have endured imprisonment and overwhelming pain can find restorative powers in Nature. In fact they can often appreciate more vividly than anyone else the stunning beauty of Nature’s simplest sights – the greenness of young stinging nettles, the gloss on the neck of a mallard duck. But if your senses have been dulled by the daily grind, you can certainly heighten your observational powers and become more intimate with Nature by
interacting
with it. One way to do this is by recording the experience, for example by: 

•
 photographing
 

•
sketching
 

•
painting
 

•
tape-recording
 

•
writing.

The great Romantic poets like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth, whose work celebrated the wonders of wild Nature as none of their predecessors had ever done, recorded their walks and excursions in detail. They invented a new concept – ‘interpenetration’ – to describe the way in which a person’s moods and feelings may be reflected and changed by observing the natural world.

When we closely observe Nature, our perception is altered and we feel ourselves to be part of that natural environment. In Coleridge’s famous poem ‘This Lime-tree Bower My Prison’, for example, the poet’s London friends have come to visit. They had all planned to walk in the beautiful Somerset countryside and take in Coleridge’s favourite haunts, except that his wife has accidentally spilt boiling milk over his foot and he is lame. So the party goes off without him, and Coleridge sits among the lime trees in a friend’s garden feeling very sad and sorry for himself (he was very susceptible to despair as one of the side-effects of taking opium, the ‘stress management’ of his day). The poem describes the process of Nature healing mood and mind, which is exactly what Nature can do for you too. It ends with:

…
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,

No waste so vacant, but may well employ

Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart

Awake to Love and Beauty
…

GETTING INVOLVED WITH NATURE

Here are eight simple ways of ‘getting involved with Nature’ when you pay it a visit to make your recording:  

•
Cloud-spotting
. Observing cloud formations is both rewarding and fascinating. Sunrises and sunsets can be breathtaking. There is even a convenient pocket-sized book to help you with this hobby
¹
in which you collect cloud formations and score points, according to how unusual they are. The Cloud Appreciation Society has a website: www.cloudappreciationsociety.org. Or try
stargazing
…
 

•
Wildflower and grass count
. Count the number of different wild flowers you can see in the space of, say, a 20-minute walk. Please don’t pick them or dig them up as this is illegal and unfair to others. Or you can count the myriad different types of grass – some are extremely beautiful. It’s easy to lose track of time and self doing this.
 

•
Birdwatching
. Or ‘twitching’ as it is known among aficionados. A lightweight pair of binoculars will enhance your pleasure. You can get help with what you see from the RSPB on www.rspb.org.uk/birdwatch and identify individual birdsongs.
 

•
Wildlife discovery
. Find a comfortable quiet spot, keep silent and your green surroundings will soon spring to life. If you prefer to be more active, learn to identify the footprints and tracks of wild animals like badgers, deer and foxes and follow their trails.
 

•
Tree bark ‘sculptures’
. You can train yourself to be more imaginatively observant by looking for sculptured shapes and ‘faces’ in tree bark (gnarled old oaks and beech trees are best). If you record them you can get some amusing and amazing results to show friends.
 

•
Fungus spotting
. The best time for this is obviously autumn. Count and record the many different types of exotic and interesting fungi and learn about their properties. Be careful as some are extremely poisonous, but their beauty and variety of structure will intrigue you.
 

•
Insect study
. If you turn over a rotten log in a field, a little world reveals itself of scurrying and scanty beasties that may be new to you. One of the most secretive things I ever saw in our nature reserve was the body of a tiny dead shrew, apparently moving smoothly along the ground by itself. Beneath it were three sexton beetles, bright yellow and black, taking the body away for burial. Such wonders abound. You just have to go out and look for them.
 

•
Beachcombing
. Find a beach, find the tide-line, get there before anybody else and search for mysterious and wonderful objects. Then you could turn them into something artistic for your creative challenge. 

GARDENING

How can gardening possibly help someone in despair?

To survive in prison, one must develop ways to take satisfaction in one’s daily life … To plant a seed, to watch it grow, tend to it and then harvest it, offered a simple but enduring satisfaction. The sense of being the custodian of this small patch of earth offered a taste of freedom …

This is Nelson Mandela talking about how he kept sane during his long years of imprisonment. It comes from a very uplifting book about torture victims who have been helped to rebuild their shattered lives by planting, tilling, hoeing and growing, called
The Healing Fields
.
²
For these desolate people, working with Nature enabled them to communicate what they felt. It gradually brought them back from their lonely inner darkness into daylight.

Grow something!

Your
gardening challenge is simply to
grow
something of your very own. Bring Nature home to you by going along to your local nursery and buying seeds (very cheap) or bulbs, a bag of compost and a tub or pot to put them in. Ask for advice on what you need and read the instructions on the packaging. With a little initiative and planning you can grow pleasures for your eyes, scents for your nose and delicious vegetables for your dinner.

If you are lucky enough to have a garden, choose a particular patch that you can dig over and make it your ‘Garden of Contentment’ to attract birds, butterflies and bees. Sketch out a plan first, and decide on the colours, heights and foliage you will need. Then begin preparing the soil for your planting. Put your hands in it – that is the good earth! You don’t need a big space for your purposes: tubs and climbing plants work extremely well in a tiny walled town garden. As your Garden of Contentment becomes established you can make it more exotic by including a small inexpensive water feature.

If you have no garden, choose window displays or indoor plants, or check out local allotment spaces. The important thing is that you should grow and tend something you plant and see it come to fruition. As Nelson Mandela says, it will give you enduring satisfaction and a taste of freedom.

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