This may seem somewhat of a strange topic for me to cover on my blog. People will see that I tend to write upbeat and positive blogs about family, friends, pets, loved ones and trying to achieve your goals and ambitions. I like being positive. Not in that annoying way where some people are ridiculously happy for no apparent reason. They should be banned from going out in public!
I have been out and about talking about my book with people and on many forums, groups and websites I see a similar discussion about bullying, losing loved ones, losing pets, not having jobs or qualifications for jobs, being alone, breaking up with girlfriend and just very negative posts from people that are really down in the dumps, depressed and in some cases suicidal.
I myself suffered from depression, suicidal tendencies, and I had a lot of hate in me. This has been a running theme since I was in my late teens, about 19. I am not going to bitch about my reasons or troubles, as I think the majority of people have it a lot worse than me. I did work with suicidal people a lot during my early twenties, when I taught martial arts.
Back then I wrote books on philosophy and techniques to improve your lifestyle and replacing negatives with positives. This meant I had hundreds of people sending me e-mails and asking me questions. I think ninety-nine percent of suicidal tendencies stem from a feeling of “Lost”, now that is easy to say “Nope!” I know I did. The thing is when you break down the core reasons of why you feel this way, the why’s, how’s, whose and what not’s, you come to the conclusion of being lost or alone or both.
I just want to do a little technique that helped me take my first step out of feeling suicidal. This does not cure depression, this isn’t even a cure. It is just something to take a step forward. It is a very easy thing; basically I want you to write down five things that make you happy. They shouldn’t be big things or things out of your control, and losing control is a big issue with depression/suicide, so we want to take back control.
So, here are the five things that I wrote aged twenty-two (I will allow a brief laugh, but it cannot go on longer than a minute!) My five things were “Walking my dogs”, “Candles”, “Twilight Sky’s”, “Hot Baths” and “Music”. This is called focusing on the positives, one of several techniques (that I will be posting over the next few weeks) to help you move forward.
I will try to keep this short, as I don’t want to steal your time, but why did I pick those five things? I love my dogs, clear to see because I write novels about my old dogs and current dogs, and walking them got me out the house and made me happy. I also like adventure, so I would try to take them someplace new every day. I love candles, the smell of them, and the flickering flames and when chilling out to music, it relaxes me and helps me escape. I love hot baths, as I train hard with martial arts and that eases my muscles, combine music and candles and for 30 minutes nothing else matters. Twilight Sky, the name of my martial art style, I would sit on a hill in the forest and watch the sun go down and the night creep in. I love that moment between day and night, between darkness and light.
I made sure I did these five things every single day, as they just gave me something to look forward too, made me a little happier and when your mind is in a slightly different place your problems don’t seem so bad and you can think up other ways of dealing with them. So, I hope that if you are feeling down, depressed or lower than this. I hope you will try this technique; you have nothing to lose and hopefully you will have a brief moment of happiness in your day.
