Blog 258 – Using Meditation to Leave The Pit, Part 4 – 21 May 2025

I finished Blog 257 with these words.

The music is only an efficient tool to help you eliminate clutter from your brain.  You need to eliminate the clutter because the clutter is the reason why you are still in the Pit.  Toss the clutter into the rubbish bin and the way out of the Pit becomes so much clearer. If you simply get lost in listening to beautiful music, this gives you the same effect as asking the doctor for some pills.  It dulls the pain, but the muted pain stays with you forever. If you simply listen to beautiful music without getting rid of the mental clutter, you are just rearranging the furniture in your room in the Pit to make the room more user friendly – but the room remains located in the centre of the Pit. Don’t use the music to rearrange the furniture in the Pit. Use the music for its intended purpose – getting rid of the mad mess of thoughts in your head so you can walk away from the Pit and never go back.

I am serious when I say that you must avoid the attractive trap of avoiding your genuine escape from the Pit by thinking you can escape just by listening to wonderful music.

The wonderful music will certainly make you feel better while you are listening to it, and for a short while after it has finished, but music is not your escape vehicle.

The only escape vehicle that will ever exist is a hero called YOU.

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I keep repeating my purpose.

My purpose is to give hope to those who have lost hope. Without hope, we remain lost in the Shadow Lands.

You are the hero and you hold within yourself, the only key in the whole universe that will ever unlock your exit from the Pit.

That is not a fantasy but the literal truth.

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Photo of me next to the 4 wheel drive that got me into the camp at the base of Mount Ragged on 10 April 2011.

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I took this photo on 8 April 2011 when I camped at Cape Arid National Park on the eastern coast of Western Australia.  There is no phone reception and no services of any kind; bring your own water, food and everything else.  If you do not bring everything you will need, there is a good chance you will die.

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This is the track that eventually brought me to the Mount Ragged campsite on 10 April 2011.

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Contrast the wild ruggedness of the dirt track I drove along, with the fragility of this glorious butterfly!

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Dawn on 11 April 2011 at the Mount Ragged campsite.  Dawn actually looked so much better than shown in my photo.

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I camped in a bush camp at the bottom of Mount Ragged on 11 April 2011.  The nearest living human being was no closer than 200 kilometres away.  If you get into trouble in this area, it is not possible to phone a friend.  If you break a leg climbing Mount Ragged, you will have to crawl down the mountain; even if you do crawl down the mountain, you will probably die.

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In case you did not completely understand what I have been saying, I will repeat myself.  The purpose of listening to the beautiful music is to enable you to develop the ability to focus your thoughts.  If you focus your thoughts on the music, this will automatically drive the usual mental clutter out of your brain.  The usual mental clutter is what holds us in the Pit.

When you are able to focus on music which is beautiful but repetitious, you are on the way to being able to focus your thoughts by consciously excluding things that bring your spirit down.  This is why I have described musica as a tool and not as the end result.  You train yourself to control the thoughts going through you head in a similar way to how you train yourself to be a good cricket or basketball or football player – practice, practice and yet more practice is needed.

You are no more likely to become a master of your thoughts in a short time than any professional sportsperson is likely to master a sport in a short time.  To conquer the flow of rubbish constantly flowing through your brain, you must practise until you acquire the necessary skill.

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Here are some more chant artists that I have found helpful.  Some chant artists focus on the repletion of the chants rather than on making the chants sound exceptionally beautiful.  This is because these artists want to help you master the skills of meditation in preference to making gorgeous sounding music.  You should not assume that the music is boring.  The intent is to enable you to concentrate on the chant and drive the rubbish out of your head.

·         Kamini Natarajan (https://www.kaminimusic.com):

o   Chants for Meditation.

o   Chants for Meditation 2.

o   Shiva Meditation.

·         Ajeet Kaur (https://www.ajeetmusic.com)

o   Haseya.

o   At the Temple Door.

·         Dechen Shak Dagsay (https://www.dechen-shak.com):

o   Day Tomorrow

o   Jewel, Joyful Heart Through Precious Tibetan Mantras

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Tomorrow, I will tell you more about how to meditate.

 Blog 257 – Using Meditation to Leave The Pit, Part 3 – 20 May 2025

You are asking “Am I really saying I should sit down somewhere and do nothing and this will get rid of my depression?”

I can hear you saying this is crazy.

It may sound crazy, but if you REALLY want to get out of the Pit of Despair instead of wallow in it, you – and no one else – are the only one who can get you out.  You and no one else are the only one who can get you out.

If you convince yourself that you can walk away from the Pit … if only

·         You had a loving husband to take care of you

·         You had a loving wife to take care of you

·         Your friends and family really understood what you are going through

·         You had another gorgeous dog just like Rufus

You are deluding yourself.

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I keep telling you my purpose.

My purpose is to give hope to those who have lost hope. Without hope, we remain lost in the Shadow Lands.

Because I want to give you some hope and not another spoonful of bullsh*t, I am indeed telling you that meditation is one of the tools you need to develop if you are to ever get out of the Pit.

And one other thing is important.  If you REALLY want to get out of the Pit, you must have commitment to yourself.  You are the only one who can cure you of the despair gripping your whole system.

You might think it is easier to ask your doctor to give you some pills, and it will seem easier for a bit, but the pills cannot actually get you out of the Pit. 

Your doctor will tell you this if you ask. 

The pills can dull the pain, but the pain will never leave you.

If you meditate, you will eventually get rid of the pain … forever … and it will not ever come back.

Hard as it may seem, meditation will guarantee you an exit from the Pit, and it gets easier as you keep at it.

But meditation takes time … just as it takes time to get to that attractive holiday destination you always yearned for. 

Buckle up and get ready for the journey!

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In Blog 256, I outlined the benefits of binaural beats to scramble up the thoughts processes and give you an opportunity to regain control of your river of thoughts.

So what do you do once you get sick of the binaural beats - and you will?

Once you have some control over the chaos of thoughts running wildly through your head, you can start to have some fun while meditating.

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Photo of me framed by one of the enormous karri trees in the forests of south west Western Australia; photo taken 5 April 2011; back then, I had a belly that was far too big.

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Cape Leeuwin coast in the south west of Western Australia on 4 April 2011.  It is so untamed! 

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Mighty Karri tree in the south west of Western Australia on 5 April 2011.  I am astonished that they used to cut these magnificent trees down so they could use the timber for better things than just looking wonderful as the trees were in the ground.

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More of the giant forest of karri trees from south west Western Australia.

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Once the binaural beats had outlived their usefulness, I discovered that if I listened to sweet, relaxing music, it helped eliminate a large part of the useless thought clutter running through my head.

I did not find any benefit listening to sounds of the rain dripping down in the rainforest or similar sounds.

What I discovered through trial and error was that if I listened to beautiful music that kept repeating the same simple set of words, my brain was able to begin focusing on the music.  The more I focused on the music, the less useless thought clutter ran through my head.  I got better at meditating!

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In addition to being very useful in helping reduce the thought clutter in your head, listening to beautiful music has a big advantage over binaural beats – you can actually enjoy the music while you are meditating.

The major benefit of chant music is that the same thing is repeated continuously in the music.  Your brain tunes in to the repeating pattern and this pushes out the rubbish that continually invades all of our brains.

There is a vast range of chant singers that you can choose from and many of them – probably most - produce beautiful music.  Soon after I started to teach myself to meditate, I discovered these chant singers.  They are so good that I still listen to them.

·         Carrie Grossman (https://www.carriegmusic.com):

o   Soma Bandhu – Friend of the Moon;

o   The Ram Sessions;

o   Homeward

·         Jai Jagdeesh (https://www.jaijagdeesh.com)

o   I am Thine

·         Tsering Cho (no website):

o   devotion

·         Yoko (https://www.yokodharma.com   

o   Treasury of Jewels

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If you think the main aim in listening to relaxing music is to allow you to relax and feel good about the music, you are wrong.

The music is only an efficient tool to help you eliminate clutter from your brain.  You need to eliminate the clutter because the clutter is the reason why you are still in the Pit.  Toss the clutter into the rubbish bin and the way out of the Pit becomes so much clearer.

If you simply get lost in listening to beautiful music, this gives you the same effect as asking the doctor for some pills.  It dulls the pain, but the muted pain stays with you forever.

If you simply listen to beautiful music without getting rid of the mental clutter, you are just rearranging the furniture in you room in the Pit to make the room more user friendly – but the room is remains located right in the centre of the Pit.

Don’t use the music to rearrange the furniture in the Pit.

Use the music for its intended purpose – getting rid of the mad mess of thoughts in your head so you can walk away from the Pit and never go back.

You can do it.

Give it a try.

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Tomorrow I will tell you more about the practical tools I use to help me leave the Pit of Despair.

 

 

Blog 256 – Using Meditation to Leave The Pit, Part 2 – 19 May 2025

 

My purpose is to give hope to those who have lost hope. Without hope, we remain lost in the Shadow Lands.

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Blog 255 finished with these words.

Meditation meant I was able to keep driving Margaret to her appointments and medical treatments; it helped me be firm enough to insist that she had to be seen in A & E departments even though the staff kept insisting they were full.  Meditation gave me the courage to visit Margaret every day when she was in hospital. Meditation enabled me to accept that although her death was unstoppable, I could shower her with love and care during every moment we had before her body was conquered.

 

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Photo of me at the top of Mount Brown on 25 March 2005.  At 964 metres, Mount Brown is the highest mountain in South Australia.

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 I took this photo on 22 March 2005 during the same trek where I climbed Mount Brown.  This is a view of the Flinders Ranges in South Australia.  Handled with care, sheep can be raised in this country, but the rainfall is too low for any crop growing.

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This is the view from the top of Mount Brown on 22 March 2005.  It was a hard climb getting there, but it was worth the effort.  I was lucky enough to get phone reception at the top and was able to ring Margaret and boast about how clever I had been in getting there.

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You are probably sick of hearing me say this, but I really am proud of you and I hope you realise how important you are.  You have the strength to leave the Pit.  Give meditation a try.  It is a useful tool.  It helped me a lot at a time when no other help was ever going to come. 

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I promised to tell you about the practical tools I discovered to make my meditation effective.

I will start with a tool that I tried to use and failed miserably with.

When I started teaching myself how to meditate, I started using guided meditations.  Surely at least some of the people putting out guided meditations knew what they were doing; even if most of the guided meditation teachers were useless, surely some of them would work.

I found not one of the guided meditations I tried was of any help to me at all.  I eventually worked out that this was because of a quirk of my brain that most people do not have – a quirk that I did not realise existed.

Every guided meditation that I have tried told me to visualise or imagine a scene in my head.  Until I started learning to meditate, whenever I was asked to imagine or visualise something, I thought that everyone in the world did what I did.  If the guided meditation told me to visualise I was in a forest for example, I NEVER saw a picture of a forest in my head.  I got (at best) the image of the word “Forest” – just as I have typed it here.  So when I was asked to visualise a forest, with a path leading down to the shore of a lake where fishes were jumping and the sun was shining over the water with a wise man or woman sitting in a chair, I got a long and confusing string of words jumping around in my head.

I wondered how a long string of words jumping around in my head was supposed to help me, so I asked Margaret what happened in her head when she was asked to visualise something such as a forest path.  I was shocked when she told me that she actually saw a picture in her head of a forest path.  Until then, it had never occurred to me that when people were asked to “visualise” most people actually saw pictures of the things they were visualising.

Once I knew I was wired differently from most other people – at least in relation to visualising – I did a google search and found there is a label for people like me – “Aphantasia” is the label.  Wiki says “Aphantasia is the inability to voluntarily visualize mental images.”

So because I cannot visualise, using guided meditation was of no use to me in learning how to meditate.

If you are like me and cannot visualise, you will probably find guided meditations are not helpful.

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Because I have loved music all my life, I decided to try music.

Although listening calming music certainly helped slow down the great river of chaotic thoughts in my brain, this did not enable me to get rid of the chaos in the river of thoughts.  The river of chaos was just too strong.

The first tool I tried that actually helped me really slow down the chaos, was something called binaural beats.  Binaural beats are when two different tones are played in each ear.  Binaural tones only work if you use headphones.  For some reason, I found that if I listened to binaural tones, this genuinely disrupted the waves of chaotic thoughts in my head.  Once the waves had been disrupted, I was much more successful in learning how to really get rid of the chaos.

I no longer use binaural beats because I don’t need them.  When you start meditating, you may find them useful, but don’t get sucked in by the sales pitch. One binaural beat sounds just like every other binaural beat and there is no musical quality to them that I can detect.  Binaural beats are strictly a tool that helped me disrupt my thoughts enough so that I was able to learn how to meditate.

Some of the binaural beats I used most often when I started learning to meditate were these.

·         Jurgen Ziewe created two binaural beats albums that he gave away for free from his website https://www.multidimensionalman.com   They helped me

·         Two young men from Adelaide published some useful binaural beats under the name Sacred Resonance – https://www.sacredresonance.com.au   They also helped me.

In a practical sense, the binaural beats are all the same and once you have one or two, getting more is unlikely to be any more helpful than using the ones you already have.  Some websites charge far too much for what is a fairly uncomplicated product, so you can afford to be choosy.

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Tomorrow I will tell you more about the practical tools I discovered to make my meditation effective.

 

 

My purpose is to give hope to those who have lost hope. Without hope, we remain lost in the Shadow Lands.

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Blog 254 finished with these words.

When Margaret was so very ill, meditation enabled me to accept that there was nothing I could do except always be there for her whenever she needed me.  The best solution to Margaret’s illness was for me to accept that there was no solution.  She was dying and I needed to ensure I did everything thing I could to ease her pain. And that is what I did.

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I like to bushwalk with a backpack on my back and trek through wild places.  This was me on 22 September 2010 at Wilpena Pound in South Australia’s astonishing Flinders Ranges.

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I also took this photo on 22 September 2010 when I was in the Flinders Ranges.  Margaret could never understand why I liked to walk for miles, sleep on the ground in a sleeping bag, and then carry a backpack for yet more miles before again sleeping on the ground in a sleeping bag.  What can I say?  You either understand because you do it, or you will never understand because you do not do it.   I do it because it makes me feel more alive. 

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I took this photo on 5 March 2011 when I was camping in Ceduna in South Australia.  If you want to see glorious sunrises like this one, you have to be up and about before dawn.  If you do this, the reward is unbelievably uplifting.

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I was completely proud of you.  I hope you realise how important you are.  Without you, the universe would not know how to exist.

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So how on earth can meditation help you get out of the Pit?  The first thing you will notice if you try meditation is that you will fall asleep.  You heard me, meditation will send you to sleep; as soon as you slow down that great river of your thoughts, your body will immediately say it is time to nod off.  Don’t panic, that is actually a good sign!  You have slowed yourself down enough for your body to be able to say “Thank goodness, at last I can get a rest”.

Don’t give up just because you get sleepy.  If you immediately fall asleep and wake up wondering what has happened, this means that you have pushed yourself so hard that you were exhausted.  When you are exhausted, you need rest.  Falling asleep when you are meditating is a sign that the process is working.  Just imagine, you have slowed down the great waterfall of thoughts running through your mind; you have done it so much that your exhausted body is finally able to get the rest that it so desperately needs.   Resist the sleepiness, but do not panic if the sleep wins the struggle.

The essence of meditation is to accept what is happening and not be utterly panicked by it.  Accept that your diet at the moment sonsists only of sh*t sandwiches.  If you are panicked by having to eat all the sh*t sandwiches, you will not be able to clear your thoughts enough to be able to work out how to lay hands of genuine nutrition to replace the sh*t sandwiches.

In my experience, the major benefit of meditation is to allow my brain which is working overtime all the time, to slow down.

It may sound crazy, but when you are surrounded by chaos, the best way to tame the chaos is to slow your thoughts down.  If you can slow your thoughts down, your ability to precisely identify what is happening, will improve greatly.  Once you identify precisely what is happening, the best course of action will often be obvious.

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I was with Margaret when the doctor told us that she had an untreatable cancer and that she would die in less than 5 months.  The news was devastating.  Surprise, surprise, I panicked.  Margaret was had an illness that the doctors could not cure.  She was dying and I wanted to stay alive.

When we got home, I meditated.  By that stage, I had been meditating for six years, so I was much better at it than I had been when I started.  The great river of crazy thoughts became fifteen River Amazons - all rushing madly through my head.  My wife was dying, I did not want her to die, what could I do … you know the sort of stuff in the crazy, horrible dance that went through my head.

Eventually, the Amazons started to settle.  

There was nothing I could do to cure Margaret of the cancer … nothing at all.  

The only thing I could do was to make sure that whenever she needed me, I would be there for her.  If I fell into a crazy panic of despair, Margaret would still have untreatable cancer, and she would know that I was a useless donkey who could not be relied on to help her with her daily struggle to stay alive in the time left to her.

I swallowed the sh*t sandwich of Margaret’s untreatable cancer – just as Margaret did.

If you think meditation is a miracle cure for anything, you will be very disappointed.  Meditation is not a miracle cure.  But it did help me swallow a continuous diet of sh*t sandwiches and help Margaret in every possible way on her journey into the next world.

Meditation meant I was able to keep driving Margaret to her appointments and treatments; it helped me insist that she had to be seen in A & E departments even though the staff kept insisting A & E was full.  Meditation gave me the courage to visit Margaret every day when she was in hospital.  Meditation gave me the courage to make sure I knew exactly what Margaret wanted me to do when the end of her life was close.  Meditation gave me the courage to tell the doctors to turn the machines off and let her die when only the machines were keeping her alive. 

Meditation enabled me to accept that although her death was unstoppable, I could shower her with my love and care before the cancer conquered her body.

Meditation is not a miracle cure, but it is an effective survival tool.

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Tomorrow, I will tell you more about the practical tools I discovered to make my meditation effective.

 

Blog 254 – Leaving The Pit of Despair, Part 9 – 17 May 2025

My purpose is to give hope to those who have lost hope. Without hope, we remain lost in the Shadow Lands.

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Blog 253 finished with these words.

Tomorrow I will tell you about the physical things I did to make sure I got myself out of the Pit.  I still do the same things because the Pit always beckons and it is so easy to simply fall straight back into it. Some of the tools I use are yoga and meditation.

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This was me on 11 November 2015.  Back then, I had started to teach myself how to meditate but I had not yet started yoga.  Meditation is not some crazy, religious cult practice.  It is not even a religious practice.  It is a tool that sits outside every religion and it does not contravene the beliefs of any religion at all.

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This is a photo of Margaret from about 2010.  She had regained much of her health after we married in 2009, but unfortunately this recovery was not permanent.  There were few occasions after this photo when she ever looked so healthy.

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This was sunset when Margaret and I visited the island of Santorini in Greece.  If you look, you can see the golden pathway folding out from the Sun straight across the sea towards Santorini.  Try and remember, there is always a pathway to climb out of the Pit of Depression.

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I was as proud of every one of you as I am of my son Chris and my friends Alf and Mario.

You probably do not wear a uniform, but that does not matter.  Heroes never actually look like heroes.  They simply are heroes.

I am a hero too and I try to convince myself just how much I matter.

Like you, I have trouble realising that there is anything important or heroic about me.  How can there be?  I am just me.

I have always been wrong in my assessment of me just as you are probably wrong in your assessment of you. 

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I have always been a great reader.  In my grade 1 class in 1955, there were 64 children.  No, I am not exaggerating.  The teacher was a Brigidine nun and the school was run by the nuns in Port Melbourne, Victoria.  It no longer exists. The nun wrote the letters of the alphabet on the top of the blackboard – one line of lower case letters (little letters) and one line underneath of upper case letters (big letters).  Somehow, in the chaos of this classroom filled with children, the num was supposed to teach us how to read and write.  She couldn’t of course.

I used to read 3 or 4 books every week.  I have now slowed my reading down.

In late 2013, most of the books I was reading (all non fiction) said that if I really wanted to become a better human being, I needed to start meditating.  The books all said that once I made the decision to meditate, a meditation teacher would appear.

No meditation teacher ever popped up and I got tired of waiting to start doing what the books said was very important.

I did what would be done by anyone who had taught himself how to read and write in a class of 64 children.  I decided to teach myself and got some books which supposedly would tell me how to meditate.

I got nowhere of course.  I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing and the authors of the books I was using had no more idea what I did.

Eventually, I did teach myself how to meditate and what I say in this and future blogs about meditation is based on my own experience of teaching myself how to meditate.

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I will start with trying to give you an idea of what meditation is.

It is not a fancy word for some idiotic religious “experience”.  It is a purely physical exercise that you subject yourself to because it helps you to calm down in difficult situations.  Because you are calmer, any decisions you make are likely to be far more effective in solving whatever problem you are faced with.

Try to stop, be calm for a moment and try to eliminate all thoughts from your head.

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You cannot, because it is impossible.  Not even the most holy Buddhist monk is unable to completely stop the massive river of thoughts that cascades through our brains every moment of the day.

The best that I can do is slow down the massive river of thought.  When I do that, I am able to ignore most but not all of those other matters which always try and catch my attention.

My definition of meditation is slowing my thought processes down so that the rubbish can be ignored.  When I am able to do this, I find my mind simply gives me the best solutions to the biggest problem that is bothering me.  Sometimes the solution comes while I am meditating, sometimes later.

When Margaret was ill, meditation enabled me to accept that there was nothing I could do except always be there for her whenever she needed me.  The best solution to Margaret’s illness was for me to accept that there was no solution.  She was dying and I needed to ensure I did everything I could to ease her pain. And that is what I did.

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Be like me and Margaret.  Dig deep within yourself and find your commitment.  Get your leg over the side of the bed and put one foot in front of the other.  Just do it.

Left foot.

Right foot.

Left foot.

Right foot.

You can do this no matter how low you feel.

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Tomorrow I will tell you more about meditation and how I managed to use it to help me.

Blog 253 – Leaving The Pit of Despair, Part 8 – 16 May 2025

My purpose is to give hope to those who have lost hope. Without hope, we remain lost in the Shadow Lands.

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Blog 253 finished with these words.

Dig deep within yourself and find your commitment.  Swing your leg over the side of the bed and put one foot in front of the other.  Just do it. Left foot. Right foot. Left foot. Right foot. You can do this because even though you never realised it before, you are indeed a HERO. And I love every one of you because you are such wonderful heroes. **** I will tell you more tomorrow about a different aspect of commitment – the commitment you owe to yourself.

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This is a photo of Mario.  I first met Mario in 1997 when I started walking at Morialta.  Although Mario was born in Australia, his father was born in Italy and interned as an “enemy alien” for the duration of WW2.  Mario was the living embodiment of personal commitment.

I was blessed by having Mario as my friend.

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I was as proud of Mario as I am of my son Chris and my friend Alf.

Mario never wore any uniform but he was still a hero. 

No one needs to wear a uniform to be a hero.

Everyone I have ever met is already a hero.

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Mario was born in Broken Hill, in New South Wales and his family lived in Broken Hill when his father was imprisoned as an enemy alien at Loveday in South Australia.  The internment lasted for the duration of WW2.

Mario and his mother survived the war because of the kindness of their neighbours.  The neighbours were sex workers who made sure the family had food to eat.  The Australian government didn’t care what happened to Mario’s mother and her children.

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Mario was one of the bravest people I have ever met.

He had to leave school at age 14 and go out to work.  By that stage, the war was over and his father had established a barber shop.  Mario worked in his father’s barber shop until he established his own barber shop.

Mario was 55 when I first met him in 1997.  He was far fitter than me even though at age 48, I was a lot younger than him.  

Mario was never bad tempered.

He never felt sorry for himself and he never complained.

One of Mario’s eyes was made of glass.  The original eye had been amputated by the surgeons because it was diseased.  

Mario used to laugh about having only one eye.

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Ten years after I first met Mario, he contracted prostate cancer.

One of his kidneys was sacrificed to beat the cancer.

Mario never complained once.  He only ever spoke factually about what was and what was not happening.  He never descended into the Pit of Despair.  He simply dealt with one problem at a time, with the multitude of issues involved in having cancer.

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In 2010, Mario was walking down one of the tracks at Morialta when he stumbled and started to run out of breath.  He continued walking until we reached the car park and he even complained when we rang an ambulance.  Mario had had a heart attack.

The ambulance took Mario to hospital so he could receive treatment for his heart attack.

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Mario still ran his barber shop until he finally disposed of it at age 76.

Although Mario was now officially retired, he still walked every week at Morialta.

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Mario had a strong sense of commitment to himself and to those around him.  He was a good man.

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Mario’s prostate cancer came back early in 2023.

At that time, I was deep inside the Pit of Despair because Margaret was dying.  I am sure I did not pay as much attention to Mario’s ill health as I should have – but I did have a genuine excuse.

Mario did not complain.  He had commitment to himself and to those who loved and needed him.

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Even though he knew he was dying, Mario kept up his weekly walking at Morialta on Sundays.

The final time Mario walked at Morialta was on Sunday 24 November 2024.

Mario entered Mary Potter Hospice (a hospital for the terminally ill) on Monday 25 November 2024.

The cancer finally ended Mario’s life on Wednesday 11 December 2024.

As the cancer and the treatments kept weakening him, Mario was forced to shorten his Morialta walks, but he never quit living or walking – ever.

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When I talk about the need for you to have commitment to yourself and to others, I am thinking of the commitment shown by Mario.

On paper, there was no particular reason for him to resist death as vigorously as he did – but the theories set out on paper were irrelevant.  Mario was true to himself.  He displayed the same commitment to himself as he showed to those around him.

Be like Mario.  Dig deep within yourself and find your commitment.  Swing your leg over the side of the bed and put one foot in front of the other.  Just do it.

Left foot.

Right foot.

Left foot.

Right foot.

You can do this because even though you never realised it before, you are indeed a HERO.

And I love you just as much as I loved and admired Mario.

****

Tomorrow I will tell you about the physical things I did to make sure I got myself out of the Pit.  I still do the same things because the Pit always beckons and it is so easy to simply fall straight back into it.

Some of the tools I use are yoga and meditation.