Local author and journalist Rachel Kelly explains how words can help an anxious mind in Kelly’s keys to calm.
Time for a new device for your mental health toolkit after more general blogs about anger and acceptance. So … try learning two or three healing sayings which you can repeat like mantras. My favourites this week are: “This too will pass”, (from the Bible – Corinthians) “My strength is made perfect in weakness” (ditto) and “But westward, look, the land is bright” – Churchill’s favourite line in the war, by the poet Arthur Hugh Clough. Healing words can help your hurting mind – there’s proof from the neuroscientists, trust me (for another week). Apollo was the God of poetry as well as medicine. Keep reciting these phrases when you feel all hope is spent or that you will never recover. You will get better. One last favourite this week is particularly helping me: I’ve just launched my memoir about how poetry in particular helped me recover from depression and of course am anxious as to its fate. So thank goodness for Mr Kipling. ‘If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster/ And treat those two impostors just the same.’ Very good for a first-time author but I hope helpful for you too, whatever challenges you are facing this week.
Kelly is the author of ‘Black Rainbow’ her memoir of how poetry helped overcome depression, published by Hodder & Stoughton. She will be at the Idler Academy talking about her book on 5th June. Tickets are £20 idler.co.uk rachelkelly.co.uk
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