mental health

Ready or not

/ Cassidhe Hart / Leave a comment

Three years.

Three years since my congregation (and many like it) has held in-person services during Holy Week.

I remember Lent of 2020. I remember people saying things like it was the Lentiest Lent they had ever Lented. And then, it just kept Lenting, kept moving through a season of deprivation and confusion and struggle. Winter came around again, and I never felt properly Eastered or summered or called again into life. We just slogged through.

Last spring, I half-joked that I had given up work for Lent: after several months of illness, I was on a medical leave of absence from my job, and my time off overlapped with Lent. I spent the weeks resting and seeking healing and clarity, and this, too, was a deep observation of Lent.

Easter was still an online celebration that year. Earlier this week I watched a video made by my congregation for last year’s Easter Sunday. Households and members had filmed themselves dancing to one of our Easter songs, and these separate videos were compiled into one, complete music video. It was done well, but watching it left me feeling profoundly sad. We were all so disconnected then – and had been for such a long time. I myself had felt unready to return to my job and the overwhelming stress that was making me ill. When Easter arrived that year, the celebration was muted.

The pandemic isn’t gone, of course, but this year is different. My community is highly vaccinated and knows how to mitigate risk. We’ve been gathering to worship in person for months. We marked Ash Wednesday and each Lenten Sunday together in the meeting house. We practiced our Good Friday music and Easter songs this week, singing them together for the first time in three long years.

My own life is as changed as our corporate one. I’ve started a new job working with local, organic food, and I’ve been writing (joyfully) all the time. My wellness has increased. My stress is manageable. Last year feels as faint as last night’s bizarre dreams.

And Lent – it hasn’t felt very Lenty to me at all.

I’ve felt more Advent-y, honestly. Waiting and wondering and living with anticipation.

I was feeling down about this as Holy Week began, disappointed that my inner life had not lined up with the church calendar, that I had not been able to engage the practice of Lent as deeply as I would have liked. Easter was hurtling close impossibly fast. I thought of the game of hide-and-seek I’d played recently with a three-year-old friend: ready or not, here I come! Holy Week had arrived, and I didn’t feel the least bit ready.

But then I remembered Lent in 2020, Lent in 2021, the long fasting from normalcy that stretched between those Lents, the wrestling with global and personal crisis that had wrung me out. I’d been Lenting, I realized, for a very long time.

We do not observe Lent and celebrate Easter in order to feel particular things at particular times. After all, we celebrated Easter the past two years in the midst of grief and challenge; those feelings didn’t stop it from being Easter. My Advent-like feelings of anticipation haven’t stopped the past six weeks from being Lent. These cycles of observance are not in place to manipulate or dictate our experiences but rather to affirm them, to demonstrate how God and God’s story of love is present in every kind of season. We practice Lent, practice Easter, practice Advent, moving through these parts of the story again and again until they become second nature. We wander Lenten wilderness – God is there. We wait in the pregnant dark of Advent – God is there. We wonder at the cacophonous mystery of Pentecost, soak in the quiet gratitude of Epiphany, mark the days of Ordinary Time – God is there. As we cycle through the story again and again, we learn to trust that birth attends preparation, revelation grows from seeking, and resurrection is not far from loss, because this is who God has promised to be. God’s generative presence does not rely on a careful liturgical performance or a specific alignment of our emotions. Easter comes – ready or not – because the God of life cannot be contained.

Maybe this has been yet another overwhelming Lent for you. There are plenty of reasons for it to be, plenty of suffering and despair, plenty of desert journeys and weapons of empire and sealed-up tombs. Or maybe Lent barely registered, a blip on the map of your year, and Easter seems impossible to contemplate. Whether Lent feels never-ending or far away, Holy Week comes. And we move through the rhythms of fierce and liberating love offered to us in every place, every time, every season we inhabit. Jesus says, “Here I come,” and we are found.

Easter sunrise in 2020

Shaking zebras and holy anger

/ Cassidhe Hart / 1 Comment

I did some very serious pillow punching this morning, hoping that my daily ritual of anger expression would somehow cleanse me of my tangle of emotions.

It did not.

Anger is everywhere I look: in the images of the crowds storming the US capitol, in the Facebook post reactions, in my own frozen, frightened body. And though I want to understand its power as a tool, so often anger paralyzes me. Whether your anger feels like a controlling force or a numbing drug, it can be utterly overwhelming.

I’ve been told that anger is a gift – a propelling fire of righteous anger can fuel our movement toward justice. So I began wondering: how do I transform my anger into action? How do I let my fear and my indignation move through me and prepare me for the loving work that comes next in dismantling white supremacy?

Last night, as I considered the stress of this moment in our nation and of the whole past year in general, I shared with my sister something I’d learned about zebras in the wild. After a zebra has survived a predator’s attempt to chase, kill, and eat her, there is a mighty amount of residual adrenaline coursing through her body. So the zebra shakes – shakes and shakes and shakes every muscle until the trauma of the recent encounter has been digested by each cell. The zebra doesn’t shake off the stress – she shakes through it.

This afternoon, after a Zoom call with colleagues and students at the school where I work in which we processed yesterday’s events together, I went into my room and created this ritual space for myself:

  • I closed the door. I looked to my window. And I began to shake my whole body.
  • I shook my arms, my head, my legs – I tried to get every muscle involved.
  • As I did so, I opened myself up to the fear and the anger I’d been trying to hold inside, and I let it shake around in the pit of my stomach. I named that fear and that anger to myself again and again. It almost felt like too much.
  • Eventually, I was spent, out of breath. I sat down in my chair, breathing hard, still letting myself experience the fullness of my emotions.
  • Once I caught my breath, I began to repeat an affirmation to myself. “I am not alone,” is what came to mind. I repeated the phrase with each deep breath in and out.
  • As my breathing began to slow, I imagined threads connecting me to each person around me, to the earth beneath my feet, to my loved ones far away. The imagined shape began to resemble the mycelium networks that burrow through every inch of forest soil, connecting tree to tree. I let that image feel as real as possible. I considered if this is what the Holy Spirit is like.
  • I wondered if there is an affirmation for us, together, not just for me. “We are grounded,” I said to myself, considering this web I held in my mind’s eye. And I felt my heartbeat slow. “We are grounded.”
  • And then I asked if the Holy Spirit had a call or a summons for us in that moment. I felt the pull to root myself deeply in that connection I’d experienced. So I kept breathing into it.

Shake, feel, breathe, center, connect, listen – I plan to go through these steps as many times as needed in the days and weeks ahead. I am often so afraid of my anger becoming destructive that I never tap into the strength of its holy fire.

We will need a lot of holy fire as we continue the work of growing just communities. So I invite you zebra-shake with me, shake through your anger, and let yourself be grounded in the truth of our connection.

Image from: https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190314-the-unexpected-magic-of-mushrooms

Practicing with Pillows

/ Cassidhe Hart / 3 Comments

Problem 1: Your overstuffed Euro-sham pillows get slumped out of shape by the end of each night.

Problem 2: You’re an Enneagram One with chronically repressed anger About. Literally. Everything.

Joint solution: A daily ritual of vigorously pounding your pillows back into satisfactorily distributed fluffiness while thinking of something you’re angry about. The other day it was climate change and an estranged relationship. Today my lingering headache took up both pillow’s worth of anger.

Our society labels some emotions as positive and some as negative, and we’re taught to carefully avoid, or at least hide, those less desirable emotions. Women in particular are socialized to refrain from expressing anger lest they be infantilized or demonized by others. This all is complicated by the fact that American culture doesn’t have have healthy outlets or processing mechanisms for anger (or its close cousin grief). Churches and other faith communities are often even more at sea when it comes to challenging emotions and their expressions; anger itself, rather than actions that might come from it, frequently earns the designation of “sin.” 

So, as an American Christian woman, I’m in for a life-long journey of learning to relate healthily and productively to one of our most powerful emotional experiences. Anger, I find, is often behind many of my feelings or reactions; but once I discover it, I’m usually at a loss as to what to do with it.

Perhaps this is your story, too. Or at least part of it.

Enter annoyingly mold-able fluffy pillows.

You likely have heard the recommendation to punch pillows when feeling angry, but I’ve found it strangely helpful to let my anger out in regular, small bursts, no matter how I’m feeling that particular morning. It’s a way of training myself in the feeling, of teaching my mind, heart, and body that experiencing this difficult emotion doesn’t have to overwhelm or consume me. Perhaps, like gratitude, anger needs a regular practice. That way, we know how to move through it when it arises and tap into its power when we face injustice.

So if you ever hear a “thwap, thwap” coming from my bedroom some morning, just know I’m practicing my anger.

Eating salad during a heart attack

/ Cassidhe Hart / 1 Comment

Today was a particularly busy day for me, laden with layers of anxiety and prefaced by a restless sleep. So, as I sipped my jasmine tea this morning, I turned my thoughts to gratitude. I listed the things I was thankful for: the capacity to do the work required of me, a dedicated team of co-workers, helpful and understanding roommates, a fantastic new apartment to move into—I mentally moved through my schedule, thanking God for the aspects of my life that made each part of my day possible. And after just a few more tastes of tea, the miracle happened: I felt better. My stress level fell and my face slipped more naturally into a smile.

I have heard the benefits of gratitude touted by everyone from my mom to the Dalai Lama, and while I believed them, I often thought that maybe I just wasn’t grateful enough. Creating lists of things I was thankful for hasn’t really had an effect on my overall mood, except perhaps to make me feel guilty for feeling bad because look at all these things I have to be thankful for!!!! That is, until this morning.

I could think up a variety of theories to explain why my gratitude list was so helpful today, but a likely candidate is that my depression is the most under control I believe it has ever been in my adult life. Gratitude is often upheld as an important antidote to depression, and while I do believe it is a necessary practice, I don’t know how effective it is against a severe depressive episode.

Practicing gratitude might be a little like eating a nourishing salad—it is undoubtedly beneficial to your health, but it’s not going to do you much good when you’re having a heart attack. Sure, eating a salad during a heart attack probably isn’t going to make things worse, and most assuredly eating a diet rich in nutritious vegetables will contribute to your heart’s overall health. But when you are experiencing the acute distress of a heart attack, you need specialized medical attention before eating a salad will have a noticeable effect on your general wellbeing.

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Now that the acute distress of my severe depression has been lifted through a network of interventions, gratitude can take its full place as a meaningful practice to maintain my mental health. In moments of stress, being thankful releases my being’s innate healing capacity and connects me to God’s renewing presence. I’m glad I practiced gratitude in the midst of my hardest depression—you don’t stop eating salad just because you discover you have a blocked artery, after all. But I’m also delighted that, when my health is strong, being thankful can actually make a marked difference to my experience of the day.

So be ever thankful, my friends. But also be ever mindful of the webs of care you might need to hold you up and help you to flourish. If you’re having a heart attack, don’t beat yourself up because your salad consumption isn’t making a difference. Get the immediate help you need, and then keep eating all the salad you want.

This, too, shall pass

/ Cassidhe Hart / Leave a comment

I recently found myself in a bout of happiness.

It was the little-things brand of happiness: when you look at the evergreen outside, you smile. Instead of tiredly avoiding conversation, you get excited to see your friends and acquaintances. You accomplish something, maybe even something small like checking your email without falling down an internet rabbit hole, and you feel truly accomplished. A cup of tea warms more than your body. Soft socks feel soothing. A phone-call with your family leaves you grateful rather than homesick. You dance to music because you feel so good you need to move. You can’t stop smiling. And sometimes, you don’t need a reason at all – you are just happy.

But I’ve got the pronouns wrong – it’s me that’s been feeling this. I don’t need a reason at all – I am just happy. What a gift. About halfway through the first day of my first “bout,” when I found myself smiling at the sun coming through my window and laughing because I was so relieved at how easy it was to smile, I said something that may, at first, seem counter-productive or a little cynical. “This, too, shall pass,” I told myself. “This won’t last forever.”

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Usually those are words I reserve for my heaviest moments, the ones that sit on my back and breathe down my neck, or the starkest moments, the ones that suck all the color out of the world and flatten it. “This, too, shall pass,” I say. To give myself hope. “This won’t last forever.” You will make it through to the other side.

But this impermanence is no less true of a smile than it is of a sigh. And while acknowledging that fact may sound defeatist or ungrateful, for me, it was just the opposite.

This, too, shall pass. So don’t worry about holding on and making it last forever. Simply receive the moment as a gift.

This, too, shall pass. Embrace this moment for all it’s worth because it only lasts for a heartbeat.

This, too, shall pass. Because all things pass. Because you are alive – a dynamic being. To live is to breathe in and out, to be happy, to be sad, to love, to hurt, to laugh, to sob, to embrace, to push away.

This, too, shall pass. You are not required to keep yourself locked in this one place, this one experience. You will feel sad again. And that does not mean you will have have failed. It simply means you are alive. You are not required to feel happy indefinitely.

English speakers have been attempting to sort out the difference between “happiness” and “joy” for as long as English has been a language. And people have sought to understand the concepts long before that. Is one a feeling and one a way of being?  Can you have joy without happiness? Happiness without joy? What does it mean to be joyful if you’re not happy? What does joy mean in the first place?

A few weeks ago I was at the Calvin Worship Symposium, attending a seminar called “Prophetic Lament” in which writers and pastors discussed the necessity of lament in our spiritual practices. One panel member, Danjuma Gibson, talked about the tendency to hurry out of spaces of grief and pain. “But I’m not sure that lament is the opposite of joy,” he said. “I see it as a particular embodiment of joy.” He went on to define joy as “the divine, eternal conviction that, no matter what, I am somebody in God’s creation.” For Gibson, joy is confidence in the existence of my relationship to the Creator and God’s good creation, the faith that I am alive and breathing and beloved. Lament, he said, when rooted in this conviction – this faith, this joy – is the choice to make my place in the world known and heard. Heard by God – and heard by myself.

Happiness, with this definition of joy, is actually not so different from lament. Happiness is also the choice to make my place in the world known and heard. Depression tends to take away my capacity to understand my place in the world and to lift up my voice in any kind of meaningful way. It numbs me. The lifting of depression opens my capacity for all kinds of feelings.

When both happiness and lament are rooted in joy, in the faith of my being beloved by God, I don’t have worry about the passing of any particular emotion. These, too, will pass, even as the conviction of my place in God’s creation remains the same. My bout of happiness did come to an end and was replaced with a gloomy, tired couple of days. But the gloomy days ended, too, and I am smiling at small things once again.

And this, too, will pass. But what a gift this being alive thing is.

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Born again yogurt

/ Cassidhe Hart / 1 Comment

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The new batch with fresh blueberries

It was the smell that did it – the rich, sour, nascent yogurt smell, rising up from the bowl where I stirred the mixture gently.  The scent was surprisingly familiar and held in it all the many times I’d made yogurt in my previous yellow kitchen as well as all the many months it had been since I’d attempted the task.  But it wasn’t a reproachful smell – it might have even been hopeful.

When I first got my yogurt maker, I’d been delighted by the weekly work of turning soy milk into soy yogurt.  It left me feeling very accomplished.  And at that time, I desperately needed something that made me feel accomplished, like I was capable of something productive.  I was deep in the obscuring grey of depression, consumed by both apathy and mind-numbing panic.  Getting out of bed was a daily battle with every protesting molecule in my body, and fearful tears threatened to overwhelm each minute of the day.  I functioned, but only on a minimal level.  Medication eased some of the pain, but I still felt like I was standing on the edge of some endless and terrifying sheer drop.  Making yogurt was grounding and normal and gave me something to eat when my energy was sapped and I couldn’t even contemplate turning on a burner.

Then school began again, with its endless parade of books and papers and projects and meetings, and eventually I gave up yogurt making – I barely had the time and energy to eat anything at all. Every once in a while I’d see my neglected yogurt maker in its kitchen drawer and envision some new, bright day when I would feel well enough to use it again.

In April, the date that marked a year since the recurrence of my depression came and went.  I was still slogging slowly through the disease.  I was still on a yogurt hiatus.

This summer, things began to shift.  The why and how of my recovery from depression, which is still ongoing, is fodder enough for its own slew of posts – a myriad of things worked together to clear the fog.  And every experience entered with interested and strength has been one more mark of returning wholeness.

So this week, knowing I had extra soy milk in the refrigerator, I pulled out my yogurt maker from its new location in my new kitchen.  I opened the box, enjoying the clink of the jars against one another.  I measured out the soy milk and located my kitchen thermometer.  When the milk just started to boil, I poured it in into my great grandmother’s mint green ceramic bowl, and I completed chores as I waited for it to cool down to the proper fermenting temperature.  Then, when it measured just under 110 degrees, I poured the cooled milk into the yogurt starter.  And that’s when the smell began. It pulled me briefly from the present moment and returned me to frightened but determined moments in my old yellow kitchen.  But the present was strong and real, and I sniffed and stirred the mixture with contentment.  The sense of accomplishment that rose up came not simply from a need to prove my worth or my health but mostly from the joy of engaging in small tasks.  Every whiff of the yogurt and ting of glass said to me you made it; you are here.  You came through a hellish year and made it to the other side, made it far enough that now you can make yogurt – because you want to, because you have the energy to, because you can enjoy the smell of fermentation and the experience of feeding yourself.  And you even have the wherewithal to write about it later.

My journey to healing is far from complete, but the simple ritual of yogurt making, at once so familiar and so new, felt like a small practice of resurrection.