Episode 5

How can we find hope?

Daljeet: This podcast contains themes that some listeners may find upsetting. Listener discretion is advised. Welcome to Spoken Truth to Power, I'm your host, Daljeet. In this final episode, we'll be playing you three voice notes recorded by two women living in Delhi, India. Mobi and Deepa will leave some thoughts about the pandemic, along with their messages of hope. 

Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi is a British MP serving the constituency of Slough, and you’ll hear about some of the mental health initiatives that he is passionate about supporting. 

Dr Roshni Beeharry is a poet, creative writing wellbeing facilitator, and former NHS Rehab Med Consultant, and she'll be talking about the importance of creative writing in helping us connect with ourselves and others, and its role in helping to boost our mental wellbeing. 

Please be aware that some of the recordings contain discussion of death and bereavement, which some listeners may find upsetting and triggering.

Tan Dhesi: Hi I’m Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, Member of Parliament representing the constituency of Slough. We are living through extremely challenging and unprecedented times, and we know that the pandemic and social distancing measures have had a profound effect on the nation's mental health. Mental health and promoting wellbeing must be a priority as we face the damage caused by the coronavirus.

In the UK, for example, one in eight LGBT+ young people aged 18 to 24 have sadly said that they have attempted to take their own life within the last year. I have raised this matter within Parliament, on the floor of the House, and the government must do everything possible to address this shocking statistic - by increasing funding to child and adolescent mental health services, and ring fence funding to ensure that money reaches the frontline so that every young LGBT+ person has access to mental health support. We know that black, Asian, and minority ethnic groups in the UK have suffered disproportionately from the virus and it has exacerbated existing physical and mental health inequalities. This must also be addressed. 

I would like to shine a light on the positive work being done by mental health practitioners, like Saiqa Naz, who is chair at the British Association for Behavioural and Cognitive Psychotherapies Equality and Culture Group and is working hard to address the structural racism within the NHS which is preventing people from accessing good quality mental health care. Saiqa and her colleagues believe that we need to ring fence funding to ensure that we can improve the mental health care for our BAME communities. They have developed a BAME mental health service user guide which explains the need for culturally adapted and culturally responsive services. It's important to fund the implementation of IAPT BAME Positive Practice Guide because early mental intervention is crucial.

I have personally suffered the loss of three of my close family members to this virus. The loss has been made harder and the grief made harsher due to usual rights of funerals being disrupted. The nation needs to remember the friends, neighbours, grandparents, mothers, fathers, aunts, and uncles who have departed, and we need to thank our NHS heroes; the doctors and nurses who held their hands as they left us on that journey. I pay tribute to healthcare staff in the UK and across the world who have faced incredible challenges and risks, and their mental health must also be protected. I would like to convey my heartfelt condolences to anyone who has suffered loss.

I leave you with some final words of hope from the poem ‘‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers’ by Emily Dickinson - ‘Hope is a thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all’. 

Deepa Shad: Hi, I'm Deepa. I live in South Delhi in India. I'm an artist, an arts and cultural manager, and a motivational speaker. I lost my mother on the 27th of December last year. Simply, I would say that my life has been full of bad experiences. I do not blame anyone for it as I gained valuable insights about my strength and power to be in most storms, most would have been succumbed to.

I was employed for a year before coronavirus hit us. A job arrived a month before, it was a blessing in disguise which I had to forego for almost five months due to pressures by the boss and his team who were going crazy jealous about how cool and good I am at my work, even online. I'm a crisis manager and a problem solver, life taught me to be, so I’m graceful about it.

I was working, motivating underprivileged children online, and being with my 68-year-old mother who was dealing gracefully with endometrial cancer, fourth stage. While most were partying, chilling, getting together with family in the urban city I live in and around me - I live in South Delhi in India - I was being positive for my mother who had a few months in front of her. Visiting Corona hospitals after hospitals, seeing her in pain every day; just me, a best friend, and mum. Life has been mean to me but this was my life’s biggest struggle, with an enemy which is not even human and all over, everywhere.

When I was out with my mum on a minefield and my armaments being my faith, trust in the lessons the universe has taught me, which helped me sail through, this time in love, togetherness, joy, abundance, and compassion. I think an ailing biological mother, and an ailing ecological mother, finally healed itself of all that has suffered and are in a better space now.

I would like to leave you with a few words of hope by his holiness, the Dalai Lama, I quote: ‘Love and compassion are necessities, not luxuries. Without them, humanity cannot survive.’ Thank you.

Moby Sara Zachariah: ‘Where there is ruin, there is hope for a treasure’ - this is a beautiful quote by my favourite poet, Rumi. 

Hi everyone, this is Moby Sara Zachariah. I'm a native of Kerala, south India. I work as a researcher and a Heritage Walk leader. Over the past eight years, there has hardly been a week when I've not gone out to conduct work and take people around, showing them the history and the culture of the city.

During the pandemic of 2020 I realised everything that I loved, was passionate about, halted, came to a pause, and I was locked up in the house, waiting and waiting for this time to get over. It extended for more than what I expected. I was hoping it to be over in few months, but here we are, almost a year and it's still going on.

The only thing that I found giving me hope and happiness was the fact that nature was healing. Nature was thriving. I could see plants, animals, birds. They’re all enjoying that there’s less humans around. Lately we’ve been hearing about the vaccine and that life has begun again, it has started with, what we say, normal. From December onwards, personally, I’ve started with one or two walks and started to go out to explore the city and monuments again. Honestly, these were the things that were keeping me sane and keeping me happy. 

With the coming of the vaccine, we all see a hope around us. I personally hope that the world heals; you, me, our family members, start with normal life again. At the same time, I really hope that nature stays here. With this hope and prayer, I would like to end it with another beautiful quote by Rumi - ‘Hardship may dishearten at first, but every hardship passes away. All despair is followed by hope, all darkness is followed by sunshine’. Thank you everyone. 

Roshni Beeharry: Hi everyone, I'm Roshni Beeharry, a doctor, medical educator and writing for wellbeing facilitator, poet, and writer. I'm absolutely delighted and honoured to be able to speak to you today about writing for wellbeing, and to be part of this wonderful podcast series that has been curated by Daljeet and the Culture Studio team, alongside the voices of poets, historians, and your amazing voices and stories from our community in the UK and in India.

So you may be asking, what is writing for wellbeing and why are you, a medical doctor, talking to us about writing? Two good questions, and I'm going to answer the second one first. If you’d have met me as a child, you would most likely have found me huddled over a book or writing stories and making them into mini books. I loved writing with a passion and could lose myself for hours tapping away on my typewriter or writing in my notebooks. I carried on writing through secondary school until it took a backseat as I focused on the sciences for entry into medical school to be a doctor. Although reading fiction remained very much part of my life throughout school to now, writing faded into the background, replaced by endless academic essays and exams at med school.

It wasn't until after my younger brother died that I started writing again. Halfway through my medical studies, he was diagnosed with inoperable, advanced colon cancer, and sadly passed away in 1996, six weeks before I was due to take my final exams before qualifying as a doctor. I passed, and with my parents’ reassurance and support that it was the right thing to do, I moved away from home in London for my first job as a busy junior doctor.

Immersed in the whirlwind of life and work, a new place, new job, new colleagues, the huge responsibilities of looking after the health of others, well, I didn't really give myself time to deal with the grief and all the events leading up to my brother's death. I just carried on, as many of us do, immersing myself in the business of work and daily life. But eventually and inevitably, grief caught up with me a year or so later and begged me to slow down, to allow myself space and time to start to process some of what I had not been able to say, or show, or express, during the previous few years. 

I know that many of you have lost people close to you in your lives, and more recently in the COVID-19 pandemic, and some of my experiences may resonate with you. There are also those of you who've had experiences of other types of loss, of leaving family behind during migration to the UK or to elsewhere, making a choice, or indeed having no choice, to migrate from your family and home and all that is familiar to you.

And more recently, many of us have had losses or changes of job situations, and family situations of not being able to see those we love. All these feelings - loss, grief, disorientation, isolation, trying to integrate into a new community and culture, adapting one's identity - all these run-like interweaving threads throughout all of our lives to varying extents, whether we've experienced them first-hand or through our parents, grandparents, and stories of others in the older generations. Change and uncertainty can be unsettling and sometimes overwhelming, and this is something we're all experiencing at periods throughout the past year of the pandemic. But we have also experienced a shift in how we communicate with each other, often in a more positive way, such as forming new communities of support across our neighbourhoods and cities, giving us the hope of reconnection.

Creative activities like writing, which can be done by yourself as well as in groups with others, are, I believe, a form of communication and connection, connecting with ourselves as well as others. We can make meaning from the stories we write and tell. I wrote my first poem when I was 26, a year after my brother died. It's called ‘Laughter in the Rain’, and though it was not particularly good, that doesn’t matter. Writing that poem allowed me to distil emotions and experiences that I had so far found difficult to articulate at the time.

This is something I strongly believe, both writing and reading poetry and fiction has the power to do, to show us we are not alone and that we share experiences as individuals and as a society. Writing for wellbeing can help us express and process experiences and emotions. It can be done using a mix of creative writing and other forms of writing, such as journaling, keeping a diary. It is also termed ‘therapeutic writing’ but it's important to note that it is not a form of clinical therapy.

The writing for wellbeing ethos, and where it differs from solely creative writing and other forms of writing, is that you're writing for yourself, not for someone else to read. Of course, you can share your writing with others if you wish and develop it further within a writing group, as I did many years ago and still do, but you are writing expressly for yourself in order to clarify your thoughts and to understand yourself better. So writing for wellbeing is more focused on the process of writing, rather than what you produce from it. Although, of course, that is important too, because it can reveal themes and ideas when you reread and go over your work, but there's no pressure to produce a complete story, poem or a novel. 

‘Nothing you write is wrong and everything you write is right for you’ is what I call the mantra of those of us who work in the field of writing for wellbeing. This statement could be hugely reassuring and empowering for those of us who may be put off writing or are trying to write maybe years after leaving school, you might be anxious that you won't be good at it or that your spelling isn't great. Well, I've never been confident about my grammar, but I have learned and improved through writing. It's so easy to doubt and judge ourselves, we all do it. The blank page does not judge you. It is there waiting quietly for you when you need it. You've probably heard the common phrase, ‘a clean slate’. Well, with writing, it’s like there’s a clean blank page of possibility. There’s hope and potential that we can create something from ourselves.

You may be surprised at what comes out when you first start writing. There may be a mix of good memories and positive emotions, but also as with anything that involves exploring how we think and feel, sometimes uncomfortable feelings and memories can be triggered. It can be hard to think and write about things that we may have pushed away for years, such as grief, loss, intergenerational issues. 

Looking after our mental, as well as physical, wellbeing is really important, especially at such tough times as we all face currently in the pandemic. Please do try to surround yourselves with trusted family and friends that you can speak to about these things on the phone, or a video call if you cannot see them in person due to the current restrictions. If that's difficult or you don't feel comfortable sharing with those close to you, it's sometimes easier and helpful to speak to someone completely independent of your family and social circle. Organisations such as Mind, PAPYRUS, the Samaritans, all have national freephone numbers and websites that you can access, and I have listed these at the end of the program notes for your reference. Your GP is also a good local source of advice and can refer you on to relevant sources of support, if needed.

So, if you’re curious to try writing or get back into writing after time away, here are some tips to get you started. Firstly, I repeat again, cast off any doubts of whether you can write or not. You can, we all can, you don't need to be an A grade student in English Literature, I certainly wasn't. You just need to give yourself the gift, and it is a gift, of space and time to explore your emotions, your memories, your experiences, and importantly, your inner creativity.

You can write at any time of day or night, writing's pretty cheap, it's portable, you just need a notebook and a pen, or you can type notes into your mobile or laptop if you prefer. It's a good idea to carry a notebook with you in your bag or pocket. I have many, many notebooks! If you find it hard to write by hand or by computer, you might like to record any thoughts that come to you on your mobile phone or an inexpensive voice-activated dictaphone. 

Some people find it helpful to keep a diary or journal to write down how they feel, and it can also be a source of ideas for other writing, which is where the concept of free writing can be particularly helpful. This is also sometimes called ‘stream of consciousness writing’ - it's a process which involves writing whatever comes to you, doesn't need to be a particular topic or a form of writing, no logical thread needed. In fact, you'll find the writing weaves and meanders into different topics, and that's exactly what to expect because that's what our minds do. It's a good way of clearing your mind so that then it’s unburdened with all the preoccupying thoughts that are stopping you from doing other productive things, like writing, or all the other activities you enjoy doing in life.

Admittedly, it can be tricky to just write. So here are some prompts to write to, so carry on writing from one or all of these phrases when it suits you:

‘This is what community means to me…’

‘Wellbeing is...’

‘I feel as if…’

‘I remember…’

So pick any of those starts of sentences and carry on writing, or do all of them at different times, and just see what happens and where it takes you when you write. 

Our increasing reliance on online technology has its benefits in that we're able to connect with friends and family far away, more easily, as well as those who cannot see due to current conditions. Writing in a group of like-minded people online, or in person when that's possible again in the future, is also a great way of sharing experiences. It's also fun to connect with other people and meet new people. 

The joy and liberation of creating something yourself, of escaping for a little while into your own world, of connecting your brain, heart, hand to the pen, to the paper. It's something really quite magical, I think. I really hope that you'll give yourself the gift of picking up a pen and notebook and writing what comes, because you never know where your writing might take you. Thank you for listening and all the very best, and happy writing!

Daljeet: I hope that you have enjoyed hearing contributions from everyone in this final episode. I'd like to say a thank you to Moby and Deepa for their lovely voice notes, and a special thank you to Tanmanjeet Dhesi for lending his voice and providing support to this podcast project. 

We’re now drawing to the end of season one. We hope to be back with another season, exploring a new topic and facilitating new poetry and conversation. I hope that you have enjoyed the Spoken Truth to Power journey. I wanted to leave you with my final piece about resilience, hope and healing:

Commemorations of a 100 years of the Irish partition took place in December 2020. Michael D Higgins, President of Ireland wrote a powerful article for the Guardian in February about how the Irish partition is still shaping the present. Much of what Michael talks about is applicable to the history of the Indian partition, especially the importance he places (quote) on “commemoration, memory, forgetting, forgiving .. and ethical remembering”. It seems that collective healing is a long journey that we have to go through together, and remembrance is the glue that binds many generations. It’s more important than ever to revisit our collective histories as it will help us build a better version of ourselves and the world around us post pandemic. As we have seen throughout this podcast, unresolved traumas always take root somewhere, and can become the root of intergenerational mental illness and other societal ills. 

One of the first poets who left an impression on me was an Irish poet – the famous Seamus Heaney. I remember sitting in class in year 8 or 9 and focusing on the power of the pen he conveys in his poem “Digging”, and the sadness in his poem “mid-term break” never left me. Recently, thanks to Joe Biden, I discovered Seamus Heaney’s poem “The Cure of Troy” where he talks about quote (“hope and history”). I can’t read you this poem due to copyright issues, but please find it and read the full poem as it captures all the themes as well as the conclusions that we have drawn in this podcast.

I’ll leave you with a few final thoughts about hope. 

In 2017, as I visited each of the homes of the women who had survived partition, I noticed that there was something common about all of them. They all loved to care for their gardens and flowers. There was a real contrast between the pain and period of instability they had experienced during partition and the oasis of peace and tranquillity they had all created in their gardens. To me their gardens and beautiful flowers symbolised the resilience and determination which helped them to rebuild their lives in the UK. 

We will all need to do a lot of rebuilding after this pandemic finally subsides, and I draw strength from the lessons that I learnt from these women of my grandmother’s generation about how to cope with living and rebuilding after we come through these uncertain times. 

I have another story about flowers to leave you all with. In my neighbourhood lives an elderly man from Eastern Europe, who cannot speak English, but we manage to communicate through smiles and gestures. During the third winter lockdown he has been leaving me daffodils. Sometimes, I find a single daffodil tucked into my car windscreen, other days it is waiting for me on the garden bench, and I once I found it placed under my door knocker. A simple gesture, and a single flower was powerful enough on dark wintry lockdown days to lift my spirits and dispel dark clouds. There is always hope. From what I have seen in some powerful images from India recently, even marigolds can be grown on top of iron nails. 

Daljeet: Please like, share and subscribe to listen to our bonus episode featuring poet Adrian Earle, also known as Think/Write/Fly. Adrian will be sharing some tips about how to write poetry. Support Spoken Truth to Power by visiting the website spokentruthpowerpodcast.com and click 'support us'.

If you have been affected by the themes in this podcast, then please check out the episode description for information, resources, and support links.

Spoken Truth to Power is created by me at Culture Studio. Music, sound design and post-production is by Elliot Bulley. Artwork is by Amrit Singh, podcast consultancy by Chhavi Sachdev and marketing support by Katie Bevan. Promotional support was provided by Bobby Friction and Kommune.

You can check out updates on spokentruthpowerpodcast.com and join the conversation on #SpokenTruthPod. If you like what you hear, please rate, and review on Apple Podcasts and subscribe on your favourite podcast app. This season was funded by Arts Council England.