Based on the comments from last week and the discussion in class, I decided to watch the Ruby Wax video, On Loving Your Ego. It was enjoyable to watch. At first she discusses ego and the dangers of an over-inflated ego; I was worried that the talk would be entirely about this (so nothing new) but it did change course. It evolved into a discussion about her struggle with depression and the road to recovery.
She talks about identifying her “craziness” and the difficulty of accurately assessing yourself when in a radically altered state. Later, in her talk about the maintenance phase (i.e. after recovery), she goes into the importance of mindfulness – being grounded by awareness of what’s going through your head; this belies the problem she had in the depression phase, but could be explained away (experience in mindfulness, degree of straying from the “centered” path).
Another interesting point that is very much relevant to the system of self-care concept is that she discussed transitioning from treatment by an (expensive) therapist to a system of mindfulness practice, which is entirely self-maintained. I’m curious as to whether entering a self-care system like this requires a professional for long-term success.
