How can you support your Mental Health? Part II

The topic of mental health became urgently important for me in 2019 not because I became more conscious or decided to live in a slow mood, but because I had physical and mental problems. Thus I began to search for answers, methods, and techniques that would help me. Since that period more than 4 years passed and now I am taking care of my mental health consciously adding new methods and secret helpers to my list every day, experimenting, trying, playing, adding, and deleting something from the list.

So here I again would like to share my tips and techniques that help me. I wrote my first article concerning this topic in March 2023, in this new one I would like to upgrade and add new possibilities.

Breathing 

The advantages of deep breathing are as follows:

• It decreases stress and anxiety.

• It calms down you.

• It grounds/earthed you. 

• It makes you feel here and now.

• It lowers physical pain.

• It improves the immune system.

• It clears your mind.

• It increases energy. 

• It improves digestion.

• It detoxifies your body. 

If you don’t know how to breathe deeply, just do it as you feel, as you are comfortable, don’t stress yourself trying to use some special techniques. The first you can do in this way:

• inhalation 

• breathlessness 

• exhalation 

Just continue breathing adding in the future the practice of observation of your breath. While observing you will concentrate on it and your mind will become more silent, you will feel yourself more in peace.

I do conscious breathing in every difficult, turbulent, and challenging situation. If now you can't do conscious breathing don't worry, just breathe, you will feel it later and it will become integral part of your life.

Nature

Unity with nature, or nature therapy, for me means:

• Restoration of equilibrium and balance during any stress, anxiety, anger, or apathy.

• Restoration of inner strength and inner energy after an emotionally exhausting day or week.

• The opportunity to be alone with yourself and listen to the Silence of your Soul.

• Calming the nervous system.

• Filling the body and the mind with oxygen.

• Slowing down thoughts.

• Training the skill to see beauty everywhere.

• Motivated contemplation that fills and expands you. 

• Exploring new territories without a route or plan destroys old circuits and programs in the brain, eliminating old neural connections and thereby creating new neural connections.

• Activation of sexual energy, which is otherwise called the energy of creativity, when inspiration, new ideas, and dreams appear.

• Stimulation of passion for what you do, for what you live, for life in general.

So, beginning from this day unite yourself with nature, not only go to a forest, river, ocean, or somewhere in the mountains, but do it consciously feeling the energy of nature, communicating with nature, and studying from nature. Better to do it alone and in silence.

Only last year I began to feel the true vibration of nature and resonate with it on its vibration, taking out myself of the low frequency. When I am sitting near water (lake, river, sea, ocean) I do not only observe and contemplate it, I literary feel part of it that I am the lake/river/sea/ocean. This is true purification and upgrading the energy level. When I am observing surfers I feel that I do the same, it's not imagination and dreaming, this is very different, this is the sphere of feeling as if you are in the water surfing, you feel the water on your body, you feel the strength of the waves, you even feel physical pain in your body. That is real magic in practice, when you feel and not imagine. 

Hiking

I revealed hiking for me only in Germany. I even could not understand and realize why all my life in Ukraine I didn’t ever try it. In August 2023 I did my first 26km on foot and it was fascinating. Physically I was tired, but I was recharged mentally and balanced psychologically. I felt myself happier and calmer, slept better, and was not terrorized by negative thoughts.

According to different research, the benefits of hiking are obvious and significant:

• It reduces depression and lowers the risks of depression.

• It calms down your monkey mind and puts it in a meditative state.

• It opens new perspectives and possibilities in perceiving life.

• It reduces stress and anxiety.

• It improves your quality of sleep.

• It helps to recover after fatigue.

• It increases serotonin, the hormone of joy and happiness.

• It improves memory and creativity abilities.

So, it’s obvious that hiking is a great therapy by nature combined with physical activity due to which your body is energized, your mind becomes calmer and sharper, your creativity is discovered, and your soul rejoices.

Meditation 

Meditation:

• Calms the mind. 

• Balances the nervous system.

• Restores strength and energy.

• Reduces stress, tension, and anxiety.

• Refocuses on the positive side.

• Teaches to be here and now, in this very moment.

• Helps to become more conscious.

• Changes your mindset and way of life.

• Cultivates your creativity.

Meditation is not about tension but about relaxation, not about control but about observation, not about internal struggle and resistance, but about letting go and dissolving any internal struggle and resistance.

please sit down in a lotus position somewhere in a calm place, close your eyes, straighten your back, and breathe deeply. Not overtry. Better to sit with not very straight back and feel comfortable and relaxed, than to sit with a very straight back but feel extreme tension and stress. Then very slowly begin to focus on your breathing (but not control it), feeling the breath, observing how it influences your body, your inner systems, and your cells. Just observe. Observe your breathing. Observe how you make the inhalation and the exhalation, and how your cells react. Don’t give up too quickly. I don’t know any person who could do it from the first time. Calmly practice. Open your eyes, smile, and thank yourself and your body for this exciting experience.

For several years I just was trying to simulate meditation, to play this game that I can do it, to fake it till I make it. Now I really can do it and it helps me, moreover, I do not need anymore a guru or a spiritual teacher to guide me, I can not only do it by myself but I also created numerous own meditation practices. 

Sound Healing

I revealed it in Kyiv and continue using this practice in Germany. If you, of course, are not in India or Nepal, and you do not know which center to attend, or whom you can trust, begin at least with high-vibration music on the Internet. Numerous YouTube channels are creating such types of music.

Therapeutic writing

Make small notes every day concerning your feelings and emotions, reactions, and deeds. Write everything that disturbs you, annoys you, or challenges you in your notebook. Do not think about what you are writing, just write. You do it for yourself, not for other people or social media.  

• Where did you progress?

• Where and what is very difficult and even challenging for you? 

• What irritates you? 

• What inspires you? 

This is not a poem or novel, these are small notes about your inner state. Journaling will help you to understand yourself better and to see your shadows that in the future will be transferred into your light and opportunities. 

Therapeutic writing is my salvation and my biggest friend.

Reading

I am sure that books not only make people more intelligent and educated, happier and balanced but also change their mindsets and lives, upgrade their level of consciousness, cultivate their creativity and imagination, evolve their Higher Self, and cherish their wisdom. But besides, books can heal your body, mind, and soul.

According to the article in The New Yorker “After the First World War, traumatized soldiers returning home from the front were often prescribed a course of reading. Later in the century, bibliotherapy was used in hospitals and libraries, and has more recently been taken up by psychologists, social and aged-care workers, and doctors as a viable mode of therapy”.

10 reasons «Why it’s important to read books»

• Books make people more intelligent and educated

• Books make people happier and more balanced

• Books change people’s mindsets and lives

• Books upgrade people’s level of consciousness

• Books cultivate people’s creativity and imagination

• Books evolve people’s Higher Self

• Books cherish people’s wisdom

• Books broaden people’s experience

• Books can heal people’s body, mind, and soul

• Books unite people all over the world

Traveling

Traveling refocuses our attention, opens doors for curiosity, broadens our mindsets and life perceptions, trains our brains, and forms new neural connections, giving us a possibility to be here and now in this very moment.

When we live at home, our brain already knows everything: home, work, home, store (where we already clearly understand what and on which shelf is situated), a cafe or restaurant which we used to go and know what to order (and even if we go to a new one, almost nothing will change), sports according to a known program and road, etc. That is how, the vast majority of people, being at home, live on a machine, unconscious level, and are never here and now, that is, in the moment. When we go on a trip (to travel abroad), to an unknown country, city, or even to another continent, we know nothing there, many things are unknown to us there, and at the moment of admiration for architecture, nature, or people, we are in a fraction of seconds in the moment, here and now, our brain shuts down and we begin to live and be present. Such moments are short-term, but during our travel, there can be quite a lot. The brain cannot live abroad on a machine level, because it does not know anything there, it either enjoys what it sees, panics "What to do?" or criticizes everything (well, the roads here are not so clean, and the trains are late, and the pillow in the hotel is of the wrong shape, and in general, people are kind of strange...). Because between moments of pleasure in the present, the brain tries to turn on again and tell us how bad everything is, because it is so trained, once again diverting our attention from being in the moment. Constantly returning attention to the contemplation of something new, we increase the intervals of staying in the moment. These moments of pleasure, enjoyment, admiration, contemplation, etc. help us to be here and now enrich ourselves energetically and spiritually, and expand our consciousness. Of course, going to another level of consciousness, we can reach such moments, staying at home in a known routine or even during difficult external circumstances in the form of a natural disaster or war.

Ego awareness

The most difficult method/mechanism is ego awareness, I am studying to observe myself - my emotions, feelings, reactions, states, conditions, etc. and analyzing whether it was done from the egoic mind or the Soul. Taking attention to myself I became aware of my ego tricks and instruments. Sometimes I just shut its mouth but sometimes even seeing it I still behave in the way I used to. The difference is that I see it and consciously work with it.

Last but not least

I constantly drink vitamins, I don't smoke and don't drink alcohol. This is very important for your mental health. Cigarettes and alcohol don't heal or make you happy, calm, or self-confident, they just take your mind into the state below thoughts when you are totally unconscious.

January 13, 2023.