Month: May 2021

Grateful Heart Monday

Welcome to another Grateful Heart Monday, a dedicated time set aside for gratitude from my life each week, which for today is for something I normally wouldn’t be grateful for whatsoever and am usually quite annoyed with instead. But, I’m choosing to look at it differently, with a grateful set of eyes, and that’s for all those whirly-birds and leaves that fall into my yard every spring and fall.

For most who know me, I tend to treat my yard with a little too much OCD, liking it to always look extremely neat and orderly. But during two times of the year that last about 2 to 3 weeks each, it becomes very hard to maintain, when all those maple trees around my house shed thousands of whirly-birds and leaves.

There have been countless times that I’ve cursed those trees, shouting with my “Shop Vac” wand pointing at the skies at how annoying they are. But, today, when I cleaned up the first big round of those whirly-birds, I actually approached it differently. I approached it with gratitude, and was thankful for the opportunity to be more mindful in my life, to learn greater patience, and ultimately, to keep my mind occupied on something other than my ongoing frustrations with my health, as well as anything else I’ve been worrying about lately.

Given I don’t have any job in my life to take up a lot of my time, nor any heavy volunteer work due to the pandemic having cleared away much of that, I’ve had an incredible amount of free time, which for the addict like me isn’t always the best thing, and is precisely what I was thinking about today as I began to clear away the first big round of spring clean-up. At least my focus in my downtime was on a healthy action.

If there’s one that isn’t healthy for an addict like me, is to just sit in the house for endless hours, surfing the internet and watching tv, because it generally leads to nothing good in the long run, and even greater depression at times. Thus, having this task is a blessing rather than a curse.

So, I’ve decided this spring, and coming up this fall, to be grateful instead for all the time I’m outside taking care of those whirly-birds and leaves. I’m going to remain thankful for having something to occupy my life in a healthy way, for continuing to beautify my yard and be out in nature, and having the chance to learn how to be more mindful in my life, present in my actions, and at peace through it all.

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson

Thought For The Day

Quote #1

“I don’t think people were overmedicated, but I think health care cannot stop in the clinic. If all we do is throw pills and procedures at people after they’re already sick and we don’t deal with what’s making them sick to start with, that’s a real problem.” (Jill Stein)

Quote #2

“Overmedication is a symptom of a system that is haphazard, uncoordinated, and driven by the need to safeguard its own interests rather than that of the children it serves.” (Joseph M. Costa)

Quote #3

“We’ve overmedicated kids. Quite frankly, some of the overmedication of kids are because welfare moms want to get additional benefits, and if they can put them on SSI through maintenance drugs, they can also put them on Social Security disability and get a separate check. That is wrong on every single level.” (James Lankford)

Bonus Quote

“Our bodies are wiser than we ever imagined, and so much of what plagues them is interrelated. Overmedication has robbed us of our sense of control, and modern life has separated us from the restorative rhythms of nature. It is understandable to respond to the man-made madness of this world with tears and frustration; those feelings of distress are a pathway toward health and wholeness. We need to tun in to our discomfort, not turn it down…and sit in our being.” (Julie Holland)

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson

Trying To Rectify An Overmedicated Childhood…

I’ve had many discussions with people in recent years who often have thought I should be on some sort of medications to cope with my ongoing mental, emotional, and physical health issues I’ve been dealing with for some time now. There is a main reason why I continue to not pursue the medicinal path and that’s because of all the damage medications did to me as a kid during my formative years.

I was most definitely overmedicated as a kid and much of the reason why I believe my mind and body is the way it is now is because of that. Whether my being overmedicated was due to all the mental health issues my mother had back then or the beginning stages of my own mental health issues, I don’t know. What I do know though is that I’ve done my best to allow my body over the years to correct what was incorrectly done to it for all of my childhood and even young adult years.

How many times my mother sprayed Chloraseptic down the back of my throat for every little tickle or strange sensation there? Too many to count. How many times I was given Sudafed for every single sniffle I got is also countless. Add in the amount of times I took antibiotics, specifically Amoxicillin, each time I developed any bit of a cough or cold is countless as well. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how medicinal treatment was administered to me during my formative years. As a young adult, in my mid 20’s, after leaving home, I continued seeking pills to fix me from one doctor after another, with one perceived pain after another. Heck, one time I even though I had issues with one of my knees and had surgery where they found nothing. The result though of that was my mother coming to stay with me for a good while and pampering me during that period while I took the prescribed drugs to deal with the pain.

The fact is, this pattern began with me growing up believing that for every little issue I had going on with my health, that the only solution was to run to my mother, usually in worry, where she’d comfort me and provide something medicinal for help. I’d then trust it would do its thing, and honestly, it always did, at least from the expected outcome I wanted. I’d get comfort temporarily from an alcoholic mother and I’d feel closer to her because of it. It’s quite possible that the very reason for becoming overmedicated in life was knowing my alcoholic mother stopped being the dysfunctional person she normally was each time I was “sick”. Because when I was “sick”, she consistently played the loving mother I needed. And, it’s also just as possible that my mother needed a “sick” kid to nurse back to health to give her a sense of purpose, or at the very least, a distraction from her mental imbalances and addictions.

I learned recently that there is a medical diagnosis called Munchausen syndrome that may be exactly what I went through as a kid, and that both my mother and I suffered from it. Regardless of whether that’s true or not, I believe all those medicines I took poisoned my body and never gave my body the chance to learn how to function healthily on its own immune system. How much of that really has contributed to all mental, emotional, and physical imbalances today? Maybe a lot.

If there indeed is any truth to this, as this being the main source of all my health issues today, the only solution I’ve seen to rectify this beyond my weekly therapy visits, is to walk through what I’m feeling and let my body do what it needs to do to heal itself. That means not running to a doctor, a pharmacy, a drug store, or even a health food store to find some pill to fix anything that’s making me feel uncomfortable inside. In 2011, I actually stopped this path for an entire year, all because I allowed one of those in my life at the time to convince me that medicine was a better path, rather than continuing to listen to my spirit telling me to remain on the path I was. The result of that was a descent into madness, institutionalization for a few days, and growing far sicker. I returned to this path in mid 2012 and have remained on it ever since.

I know some may think I’m crazy for following this path, but I can tell you that living the life I once did, taking one medicine after another, visiting doctors constantly, seeking some sort of reassurance through it all, never worked. I always felt worse the longer I remained on that path in both mind and body. While the healing path I’ve chosen, one free of medicine, is often quite arduous due to having to sit with so many hypochondria-based fears surrounding my health, I still have my faith in God that I’m on the right path. And I pray that one day my mind and body will be free of all the damage I once did to it through medicinal abuse throughout much of my younger life.

Peace, love, light, and joy,
Andrew Arthur Dawson