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My name is Rachel Lewis. This is my first tattoo, I got it on my left lower thigh of a Infinity sign with a special twist, of it being a tentacle. I’m so happy with it. I got it done May 23, 2012. By Dom, at Resurrection Ink in Savannah, GA.
Makes sense on a different level
Bipolar disorder is a condition in which people go back and forth between periods of a very good or irritable mood and depression. The “mood swings” between mania and depression can be very quick
@4 days agoIt’s 1:27am here……thundering mad right now. Just came back from that beer meet up with Dan, I feel so alive now.
@2 months ago with 1 noteVisualize yourself succeeding. Like a professional skier envisioning every twist and turn of a ski run before making it, imagining yourself on the other side of a problem even in the abstract can activate a powerful belief in your ability to succeed. Even if today you have no idea how to win, a belief that you can—even a “blind” belief—can be empowering if it’s a belief in yourself.
Avoid making important life decisions when your life-condition is low. The kinds of thoughts you’ll have in general are always more reflective of your life-condition at the moment rather than the circumstances in which you find yourself. You’ll best avoid future misery if you can consciously recognize when circumstances have gotten you down and thereby produced gloomy feelings and defeatist thoughts—which, when your life-condition is higher, are nowhere to be found.
Imagine you’ve already achieved a desired goal (one you’re completely confident you can) and bathe now in the joy you anticipate you’ll feel later. I’ve often found that daydreaming about future successes lifts my spirits by bouncing my mind out of my present difficulties into future imagined glories.
Force yourself to focus on one problem at a time. Focus on what’s easiest, most important, or that which you can solve soonest. Reducing the total number of challenges confronting you will be an enormous relief and help combat the tendency to feel defeated when facing what seems to be an overwhelming number of problems.
Wait. My four favorite words for weathering all storms: this too shall pass. Think of entering into a waiting mode as an active process, not a passive acceptance of whatever fate has in store for you. Other good things often happen that raise your life-condition and enable you to handle the mess you’re facing more easily. You may think you know all the bad things that are going to happen, but outcomes we anticipate—good and bad—most often don’t turn out the way we envisioned.
Access your creativity to solve problems. Reduce the chatter in your head by listening to moving music, by meditating, by chanting Nam-myoho-renge-kyo. Solutions often bubble up from the subconscious when the conscious mind floats.
Find something to distract you. Take a real break from thinking about your problems when you’re not actively engaged in solving them. Because it’s much harder to turn off obsessive thoughts about the challenges facing you than turn on more positive thoughts, finding something genuinely distracting is the best strategy. Humor works for me as long as it’s humor that’s genuinely funny. Nothing wrong with taking a break from fighting the good fight to recharge your batteries. In fact, strange as this may sound, there’s nothing wrong with engaging in controlled denial. As long as you don’t let it prevent you from acting when action is required, it can be an extremely effective way to combat anxiety. Or…
Take on your anxiety directly. Identify the thoughts that make you anxious and follow them to their logical extreme. Wrap your mind around what it would feel like for your worst fears to be realized. What would you do then? Often if we force ourselves to imagine the worst in concrete terms it feels less frightening than it does when we imagine it abstractly.
Ask for help. You don’t have to do it all by yourself. I struggle with this one a lot, not because I have any aversion to asking for help, but because I just rarely seem to think to do it.
Accept that you must face something unpleasant. Stop worrying about experiencing pain. Stop trying to avoid it. You’ll make it through and survive. Prepare yourself to feel whatever there is to feel. The longer you wait to feel it, the more anticipatory dread you’ll feel as well. As Nichiren Daishonin wrote, “Suffer what there is to suffer. Enjoy what there is to enjoy. Regard both suffering and joy as facts of life.”
Whatever you’re going through actually does represent an opportunity for growth. The thing about cliches is that they’re mostly true.
There will come a time when you’ll struggle even to remember what’s causing you so much angst today. It’s hard to project yourself into that future, but if you stop think about it, you’ve almost certainly already forgotten about most of the trying experiences you’ve faced in the past (not, of course, the life-changing experiences—but most things that get us down on a daily basis are much more mundane).
