The Duality of Mental Health

I recently finished Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book Braiding Sweetgrass, and can’t say enough about how much I love this book. The other day I went back through my highlights and came across a quote that struck me as powerful in its natural form, but noticed the quote also resonated with me from a different perspective.

Kimmerer recalls a teaching her father shared one time. He said you must always remember that fire has two sides. Both are very powerful. One side is the force of creation. Fire can be used for good-like on your hearth or in ceremony. Your own heart fire is also a force for good. But that same power can be turned to destruction. Fire can be good for the land, but it can also destroy. Your own fire can be used for ill, too. Human people can never forget to understand and respect both sides of this power. They are far stronger than we are. We must learn to be careful or they can destroy everything that has been created. We have to create balance.

This snippet of Kimmerer’s work gives you a glimpse into the beauty and captivating way in which she ties together knowledge of our natural world with deeply resonating life truths. Holding this quote as is, there is much to contemplate and wrestle with.

But as I was reading it, I realized you could insert many things for fire and sit with the duality in which things can hold. For me, mental health stuck out.

There is so much good that can come from awareness of our mental health. Awareness can allow us to begin to understand and to heal. To gain more control in our responses to what we are feeling. It can allow us to identify persistent patterns that have been playing out for us and break the ones we no longer want to engage in.

But it can cross a line from awareness to consumption, from processing to ruminating.

Mental health is a part of our identity. One that I hope you own and embrace. But, it’s never meant to be our sole identity. There are other aspects of you, that if you embrace, can help balance out the weight mental health can have on us.

When our sole focus becomes our mental health it can become a weight we were never meant to carry. It can sway our every thought and action. It can work itself to have the ultimate say in what we do and how we do it.

But, when we embrace our mental health as just a part of us, then we can interact with it with much more perspective and cognizance. We can have multiple aspects of us engaging in our decision-making and thought processing. Our mental health can have a seat at our table, but it isn’t the only guest present.

Much like how Kimmerer’s father explained fire, there is much good with mental health awareness, but there is also a side of it that can be much more harmful and hurtful.

So, may you embrace your mental health, all aspects of it. But, may it reside as only an aspect of who you are and not all of who you are.