Imagine 1 year from now, the best, most polished, talented, and successful version of you sitting across from your computer screen. who do you imagine?  what does she have? where does she live? what has she accomplished? what has she mastered and what has she managed to put behind her? what has she healed and what does she give? what makes her laugh, and what continues to trigger her?

can you imagine being her, becoming her?

Think you cant do it?

Then you cant.

think you can, believe you can, and you can do anything. 

As cliche as this sounds, and you may have heard it a million times, i wanted to make a photo piece on how much power this statement really holds, and how i have had the privilege to live it to some degree. Chronic sadness has this overpowering ability to make us feel like there is no possible way to move forward and we are stumped by our own self-doubting thoughts and feelings. Although depression can make you feel stuck where you are, there is a power you can wield right now to overcome a little bit of the strong and successful woman that lives inside of you. and when you see a glimpse of her, im sure you wont let her go.

There may have been small decisions in life that you decided to overcome because you hit a threshold of how much pain you were willing to bear. For example knowing when to put your foot down with an annoying coworker or extended family member. This is the same power that you can use with yourself.

Your spirit truly is unstoppable, only when you decide that nothing, no matter what it is, is going to get in your way, not your depression, not the obstacles you face, or what people think of you, ultimately your life will be shaped by who you decide to be, rather than what happens to you. know that it is your decisions and not your conditions that mould your destiny!

Making this photo provided a sense of comfort for me since it displays quite perfectly the feeling of being trapped inside an aching body. As interesting as it would be to actually be underneath a frozen river, and be able to photograph it, unfortunately it didn’t happen! to answer a common question, this was all done in photoshop.

Imagine not getting 2 nights of sleep, perhaps staying up to study, not eating much, a constant migraine, muscle pain in every part of your body (no exceptions!) down to your the webs between your fingers, and the sides of your body, bones and surface of your skin. Have you actually imagined this yet? Now imagine this pain doesn’t go away after 3 days of pampering, exercising, and sleeping in, it doesn’t feel better after you wake up, or when you lie down in bed. im pretty sure you’d be on your way to nearest clinic!

but what if they do tests and cant come up with a reason for the pain? They send you home with the wave of a hand and you suffer in pain for another week?.. month? YEAR?

This is chronic pain disorder. And pain is NEVER for no reason.  I remember speaking to a wonderful friend of mine who said, ‘if i dont pick a day and time to hide and cry my eyes out, and scream the pain out of my heart, my shoulders and neck will punish me for weeks.’ Depression, and the effects of trauma on the body are not emotional or phycological challenges to overcome, pain manifests itself physically in the body, when there is no outlet for the burden on the soul. Being trapped in your own body because of pain from moving, or staying still makes it almost impossible to do anything. imagine when moving to get out of bed becomes one of the hardest things you do in your day, the pain making you immobile and leading to even more fatigue, and the difficulty to carry out regular tasks like showering, cooking, sitting in class, studying or simply taking a walk.

Most people dont understand Chronic Pain, and unfortunately find it very easy to slap clinical labels on anything that we feel. It provides a sense of belonging for sure, but there is a difference between acting a certain way because of a disorder, and having a disorder because of the what you have been through. for example having fibromyalgia because of pain, or having pain because of fibromyalgia. People rarely ever have pain because of fibromyalgia, it is completely a disorder caused by emotional pain, and the lack of healing sets up physical, inexplicable alarms in the body, that MAKE you focus on the inner pain you need to be addressing.

Chronic pain is a very hard thing to describe to those not suffering from it. People in your surroundings may become annoyed very easily and become desensitized to your pain. Fibromyalgia is debilitating at times. Widespread body pain with no apparent reason or no cause found through medical testing, can not only make you feel helpless, but horribly setback from regular day to day activities.

everyone’s Fibromyaligia is different. I recently met a sister whose fibromyaligia caused large cysts and knots to develop in the muscle tissue of her arms, and back. Another sister developed such fragile bones, anything from cold weather and a a slight angle in positioning her legs and feet while sitting in a chair would cause extreme pain in her knees that would travel outwards. Some of the pain people have described is baffling, very odd, a collection of random symptoms that dont fit together; such as nerve pops that travel through the arm and chest triggered by eye movements, while pain and pressure in the uterus make it difficult to walk. Dizziness accompanied by pain in the hips and knees, back and shoulders, collarbones and finger joints. I also know a sister who learned how to write with both right and left hands since holding a pencil for a few minutes would cause pain in her wrists and arm joints. Insomia and anxiety are almost always underlying causes, or common co-existing issues, that make it even harder to treat.

When in persistent emotional pain, the body activates the flight or fight response in an attempt to help itself. But there is no physical outlet for this response so it internalizes, and the body attacks its own immune system, giving rise to many physical issues that are not usually not related to each other.

in a way, Chronic Pain Disorder’s are a blessing; the sister who developed knots in her muscles told me; ‘whenever i’m in pain, i feel like allah loves me, and i call on him, i ask him to forgive me for my sins. i mean no-one understands the pain except him’.

Its debilitating and hard to explain, but the least you can do about someone who is in pain is be compassionate, and sensible. In the spirit of informing those who wish to understand: These are some things that can help you to understand, and help, people who suffer from, often debilitating, chronic pain.

1. Chronic pain sufferers have experienced pain from 6 months to many years. Pain has caused them to adopt coping mechanisms that are not necessarily reflecting the real level of pain they feel. Respect that the person who is in pain is trying their best, by doing things that make them happy, (hobbies, skills, activities, etc.). When the chronic pain sufferer says they are in pain – they are! support them with the things that they do to help them cope.
2. Look for the signs of pain: grimacing, restlessness, irritability, mood swings, wringing of hands, moaning,sleep disturbance, teeth grinding, poor concentration, decreased activity, and perhaps even writing down suicidal thoughts or language.
3. Don’t be put off by the sufferer’s attempts at distracting you; be persistent. It may seem odd that they want to hide their pain, but it could be that they dont want to constantly gain pity, chronic pain sufferers can speak in code or make lighter of their pain than is the reality. The next best thing that you can do is to listen to them properly, and to make it clear that you both want to hear what they have to say and that you really have heard it. Use your listening skills to decode what they’re hiding or minimizing.
4.  Understand and respect the chronic pain sufferer’s physical limitations. i CANNOT TSRESS THIS ENOUGH! Being able to stand up for ten minutes, vacuuming, or sitting on the ground may be an easy task for you, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that the sufferer can do it. Being caring and not making them feel under pressure to perform regular tasks easily goes a long way in helping them heal. The sufferer may not know, from day-to-day, how they are going to feel when they wake up and each day has to be taken as it comes. In many cases, they don’t know from minute to minute. That is one of the hardest and most frustrating components of chronic pain.
5.  Leave your “pep talk” mode for your kids and your gym buddies. Realizing that chronic pain is variable, keep in mind that pep talk can be aggravating and demoralizing for the chronic pain sufferer. As already noted, it’s quite possible (for many, it’s common) that one day they’re able to walk to the park and back, while the next day they’ll have trouble getting to the next room. Therefore, it’s vital that you don’t fall into the trap of saying: “But you did it before!” or “Oh, come on, I know you can do this!” If you want them to do something, then ask if they can and respect their answer.
6. Get over the need to simplify pain in order to make them feel better, or give platitudes about the value of exercising, fresh air, and eating healthy. For a chronic pain sufferer, “getting out and doing things” does not make the pain vanish and can often exacerbate the problems. Telling them that they need to do specific things to “get their mind off of it”, may frustrate them to tears, and is not correct advice, especially if you’re not medically trained and haven’t got a clue. If they were capable of doing some things any or all of the time, they would!
7. Remember that chronic pain sufferers are constantly working with doctors and striving to improve and do the right things for their illness. They know more than you!  dont  ”You just need to push yourself more, try harder”. You can’t always read it on their face or in their body language. Also, chronic pain may cause secondary depression adding to their primary trauma. (wouldn’t you get depressed and down if you were hurting constantly for months or years?)
8. Never use throwaway lines. Assuming you know best by making such statements as “Ah well, that’s life, you’ll just have to deal with it”, or “You’ll get over it eventually. Until then, you’ll just have to do your best”, or worst of all, “Well, you look well enough”,” you dont look sick” etc., are lines that might make you feel done and dusted with the topic but they are both a form of distancing yourself from the person and making the sufferer feel worse and out of hope.
9.  Check your own patience. If you’re impatient and want them to “just get on with it”, you risk laying a guilt trip on the person who is suffering from pain and undermining their determination to cope. They probably have the will to comply with your requests to go out and about with them but have neither the strength nor the coping capacity as a result of the pain. If you are able, always remember how lucky you are, to be physically able to do all of the things that you can do.

   Be very understanding if the chronic pain sufferer says they have to sit down, lie down, stay in bed, or take these pills right now. It probably means that they do have no choice but to do it right now, and it can’t be put off or forgotten just because they happen to be somewhere, or they’re right in the middle of doing something. Chronic pain does not forgive, nor does it wait for anyone.
10. Don’t be put off if the chronic pain sufferer seems touchy. If that’s the appearance, it’s probably because they are. It’s not how they try to be. Just try to understand. It wreaks havoc on the body and the mind. It is exhausting and exasperating. Almost all the time, they do their best to cope with this, and live their lives to the best of their ability. Just accept them as they are.
11. Be helpful. The chronic pain sufferer doesnt want to depend on people who are not sick to support them at home or visit them when they’re too sick to go out. But that doesnt mean they dont need help with shopping, cooking, or cleaning. They may need help getting to the doctor, or to the store. You can be their link to the “normalcy” of life. You can help them keep in touch with the parts of life that they miss and desperately want to undertake again.

I think that this photo is profound, and has depth in it that I wouldn’t be able to find the words for. Since the beginning, from designing the newspaper dress, through to the end, I felt a soothing sense of fulfillment while I was shooting (even when an angry train driver had the nerve to stop the whole train in order to make fun of me!), and it was quite difficult to come up with the final edited version, although I feel accomplished having it turn out almost exactly the way I imagined.

Maryam finds her self worth in helping others. She is slowly disappearing. Obliterating under the weight of others’ pain, and stories. She is the shoulder, the ear and arm of everyone she knows. To hide her own pain, she gives and gives of herself, and at the end of the day feels empty, and that’s when anxiety creeps in. Emptiness claws at her insides, to get away from which she gives even more to those at home, at work and especially children.

When working with Maryam, I found she was so hidden in who she was, as a helper and a giver, no one even knew she suffered from depression, anxiety and numerous physical health conditions. At one point one of her friends jokingly asked her ‘so what, are you like depressed?’ and chuckled, so Maryam went with the flow, although surprised at the image she had been giving to people. She developed a serious habit of fidgeting and picking at her skin because of years of internalizing the pain she wished she could overcome.

One of the ways I have seen many of my sincere Muslim sisters deal with chronic pain, trauma and depression, is by becoming fully concealed under the weight and coloration of the stories of others in pain. Distractedly being stuck in the tracks while helping others as they move on; lending a hand to each elderly lady trying to step on the train, and each young child learning to climb up the steps, the train becomes full, life moves on, and you are left on the tracks, still stuck where you need help.

Although it is wonderful to be helping others, and does provide a degree of healing, making sure that while you touch others’ lives, you’re not forgetting the little girl inside you that needs you most. She needs assurance, love, validation, support and healing. Make sure that helping others is not a way to pour everything out so that you become numb. Asking yourself whether she is getting any help of her own, or whether you are leaving her on the tracks as everyone gets on the train. In a few years she will still be standing there alone and the people you have helped will have successfully gone up and away!

Check it out:

Henna Radiance – Makeup Henna and Photography
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I encourage every woman that speaks to me, to find what is best within her. Pain can almost always make us feel like we are good for nothing. Did you know that you only display 12% of who you actually are (talent-wise) to the public?

Imagine if all of us could display 100% of all our talent, charisma, intelligence, strength and beauty within the first 3 minutes of speaking to someone. Most of us would be too shy! BUT the important factor here is; are we shy because we dont have much to give, OR because we believe we dont know much anything of value? Its important to find which out and restructure the belief that we we’re not worth much because of the weight of past stains, and the effect they have on our self-worth.

One of the most amazing emotional pain buffers you can attain immediately is finding and acknowledging your talent’s and your self worth.

What started as a healing 9 years ago was the silent, beautiful art of henna and makeup. Therapeutic in its nature and its practice, it has come a long way for me. Recently made public, and still working wonders for me, is my henna and makeup outlet for anxiety and sadness.

1. YOU: Comment: Connecting is Always number 1: without reading ahead, What does this PHOTO say to you?

2. Awareness:  Just to start off, this photo speaks volumes to me.

I recently heard a friend of mine, Megan Wyatt, say “If you constantly live in the past, you are living as a victim. It’s time to heal, and healing is a choice. Sometimes you go through a problem and keep replaying the painful moment over and over again, and think you have no choice. You do, when you can learn the reason why you are replaying it over and over again, you will be able to begin healing, so that eventually, the memory exists but the suffering and depressed emotions do not.”

Anxiety and C-PTSD

Complex-PTSD, is a variation of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Sophia may try her hardest to be strong, firm as cold ice on the outside. Yet inside, at her core she is melting, Melting is a slow process as she slowly loses all of herself. The pain is just too real, the wounds just dont seem to heal. Years and months..time numbs her and she knows all too well that she’s frozen.

Part of PTSD is the extreme anxiety that accompanies reliving an emotional flashback to an earlier traumatic event. Sometimes a current event can have only the vaguest resemblance to a past traumatic situation and this can be enough to trigger the psyche’s hard-wiring for a fight, flight, or freeze response. Its a severe anxiety disorder where a person may relive and re experience all the feelings and emotions physically and physiologically of a past trauma, sometimes through nightmares, awake, or at the most inopportune times, like at work or in public. It can become extremely painful and a person feels trapped with a complete inability to control when or where they feel what. Obviously making them feel out of place, emoty and unable to be alone with themselves as they can become very dangerous to themselves.

A flight response has been triggered when she responds to a perceived threat with an intense urge to flee, or symbolically, with a sudden launching into obsessive/compulsive activity (the effort to outdistance a fearful internal experience); a freeze response has been triggered when she suddenly numbs out into dissociation, escaping anxiety via daydreaming, oversleeping, getting lost in TV or helping others, or some other form of “spacing out”.

Here is an example of the layered processes of an emotional flashback. A complex PTSD sufferer wakes up feeling depressed. Because childhood experience has conditioned her to believe that she is unworthy and unacceptable in this state, she quickly becomes anxious and ashamed. This in turn activates her Inner Critic to goad her with perfectionistic and endangering messages. The critic clamors: “No wonder no one likes you. Get your lazy, worthless self going or you’ll end up as a wretched bag lady on the street”

Retraumatized by her own inner voice, she then launches into her most habitual 4F behavior. She lashes out at the nearest person as she becomes irritable, controlling and pushy (Fight/ Narcissistic) – or she launches into busy productivity driven by negative, perfectionistic and catastrophic thinking (Flight/Obsessive-Compulsive)- or she flips on the TV and becomes dissociated, spaced out and sleepy (Freeze/ Dissociative)- or she focuses immediately on solving someone’s else’s problem and becomes servile, self-abnegating and ingratiating (Fawn/Codependent).

The extremely difficult ability to feel through abandonment experiences without launching into inner critic drasticizing and 4F behaviour is the first step to recovery.

Chronic emotional abandonment is one of the worst things that can happen to a child. It naturally makes her feel and appear deadened and depressed. Functional parents respond to a child’s depression with concern and comfort; abandoning parents respond to it with anger, disgust and further abandonment, which in turn create the fear, shame and despair that become characteristic of the abandonment depression. A child who is never comforted when she is depressed has no model for developing a self-comforting response to her own depression. Without a nurturing connection with a caretaker, she may flounder for long periods of time in a depression.

Many PTSD survivors “thrive” very poorly, and at times linger near the end of the continuum where they are close to death, if not physically, then psychologically. When a child is consistently abandoned, her developing superego eventually assumes totalitarian control of her psyche and carcinogenically morphs into a toxic Inner Critic. She is then driven to desperately seek connection and acceptance through the numerous processes of perfectionism and endangerment. Her inner critic also typically becomes emotional perfectionistic, as it imitates her parent’s contempt of her emotional pain about abandonment. The child learns to judge her dysphoric feelings as the cause of her abandonment. Over time her affects are repressed, but not without contaminating her thinking processes. Eventually even the mildest hint of fear or depression, no matter how functional or appropriate, is automatically deemed as danger-ridden and overwhelming as the original abandonment.

The capacity to self-nurturingly weather any experience of depression, no matter how mild, remains unrealized. The original experience of parental abandonment devolves into self-abandonment. The ability to stay supportively present to all of one’s own inner experience gradually disappears.

You can gradually deconstruct the self-abandoning habit of reacting to depression with fear and shame, and the inner critic. It is a labor of self-love and a self-nurturing process of the highest order.

i will be making a video series about managing emotional flashbacks.

But here’s a point to ponder on until then. While you might still momentarily feel small and helpless when in a flashback, you can learn to remind yourself that you are in an adult body and that you now have an adult status that offers you many more resources to champion and protect yourself and to effectively protest unfair and exploitative behavior.

I usually find that this work involves a considerable amount of grieving. Typically this entails many tears about loss and pain. Grieving also tends to unlock healthy anger about a life lived with such a diminished sense of self. This anger can then be worked into recovering a healthy fight-response that is the basis of the instinct of self-protection, of balanced assertiveness, and of the courage that will be needed in the journey. Imagine yourself confronting a current or past unfairness, this is often delicate work, when the unmastered, threatening situation has been successfully reinvoked at non-flooding levels, you  can become more aware of how fear arises, and to practice staying present to it and its associations. This then sets the stage for the deconstruction of internal and external self-destructive reactions to fear, as well as the continued grieving out of the pain associated with past traumas.

When you feel the cold ice of a memory creeping back into your mind, the core mistake you make is to run away from it as soon as you can. Its not your fault though, in fact its a healthy sign, that your body is working toward keeping you safe, since you cant fight the memory you seek to flee from it. In either case your trying to be ‘safe’ with the ‘fight or flight response’. Next time allow yourself to ‘feel’ the memory in full, and what its actually trying to tell you. WHY do you relive this memory again and again? what is in it that bothers you? what does the memory say about you? something that you dont like and cant accept? something that you wish you could change?

once you realize the deeper reason that you keep reliving the pain, you will be able to make a stronger choice to start to heal from it.

Action items :

Connecting is always number 1: what does this picture say to you?

dont forget to Comment like and share.

Some Content by Pete Walker.

Ever had a tornado of thoughts? especially when they get mixed up with ideas, that may or may not turn into hopes that you then start the gory validation cycle with?

Journalling is a huge source of healing. Mainly because it allows you to analyze and order your thoughts.

So at least YOU know you’re perfectly sane :) Every feeling has a reason.

when that tear slips out and rolls down your cheeks, KNOW that Allah values it. he counts it and comforts you with his mercy. why cry when no-one cares? flip it around and KNOW that Allah cares, TRUST him, he knows you better than yourself. you dont even have to EXPLAIN anything to him. you can just look up and smile because he knows everything already.

peace my soul. PEACE.

without reading ahead, What does this PHOTO say to you? SHARE it in the comments

Action items :

Connecting is always number 1: what does this picture say to you?

See behind the scenes, what did this look like before?

dont forget to Comment like and share.

1. without reading ahead, What does this PHOTO say to you? let me know in the comments

2. Awareness: It seems obvious to others, and comments like ‘can’t you see?’, and ‘its not that hard, just pick one way, trust Allah and keep going’, are usually are flying left right and centre. As innocent as it may seem, confusing and hurtful is how they come off, making a person think in a way that becomes self-destructive; “Maybe its right in front of me, everyone is right and I must be wrong. i must be so dumb that I cant even see it. WHY cant I be as simple and black and white as they want me to be. How stupid and ugly can i get; that’s why they are right and I am wrong. in order for me to be simpler, and likeable, and ‘normal’, STOP thinking in this way, i DONT actually feel the confusion, I don’t actually feel the emptiness and the anxiety, and I certainly DON’T feel the fulfillment in life because of  myself, everything is my fault. BE simple.”

This photo displays what Sophia feels often; that the light, or the answer is all around her, but she cant see it. Perhaps everything is clear. She  wishes to god that the answer was one simple thing, that she could put in a few sentences. Her parents, friends and everyone around her is frustrated by the complexity in her thoughts, they cant figure out for the life of them why she makes things so complicated. But flashbacks rule her life, the past holds her in place, while the future begs to pull her out. So she stays staggering in the centre as years pass her by. Emotions keep her body from functioning properly and they get blocked in certain places. The comments and pressure from around her make her doubt herself, her life, the realities that she faces in her mind, the images smells and sounds that scratch at her insides. So she begins to hate herself. She lies to herself, she blames herself. She hates the sound of her crying, her attempts to make things better. She battles with herself trying to make sense of the truth she so vividly lives inside, yet the outside world makes her believe is wrong. And all bad things are her fault, she can turn her life around if she wishes. Sophia fell into a terrible habit because of her pain, she begin to fill in emptiness with an activity that became an addiction.

3. Help: i recently found an amazing emotional freedom technique that FINALLY worked for me, to work through emotions which i will share in the next photo-piece.

in the mean time, please enlighten yourself and anyone that is still wondering what INDY is about:

I recently got bashed down for starting this project, and had many people around me jump to conclusions, (because of the lack of knowledge that they have) that i have a mental illness that affects me and the way i act, speak and think; therefore i should not be trusted and neither should my words be taken as truthful since i don’t know what im saying. CORRECTION: i do not suffer from a mental illness, alhamdullilah! EVEN if I did, I would be proud and would not feel shame in mentioning it, as no one should because it is noones fault, it is the Qadr of Allah!  i would have named this project ‘mental illness awareness’ if that was the case.

I do suffer from other things that i will make public in my peices,  I started this project to raise awareness about people who suffer from ‘psychiatric vulnerabilities’ because of past trauma that has stained their lives. i.e people who have suffered from emotional pain, or trauma, that has not been healed or solved, to the degree that it affects their daily thoughts, core beliefs, actions, decisions, speech, mannerisms, attitude, sleeping habits, etc, and the pain makes them fall into addictions, self-mutilating behaviours, suicidal thoughts, anxiety disorders, insomnia etc. As well as physically manifests itself in their bodies as illnesses such as fibromyalgia, MS, chronic bodily pains, tendon, bone and muscle pain and stiffness, nausea and vomiting, migraines and headaches, bowel and digestive system irritability, ulcers, and the list can go on forever!

The project is to:

1. Provide a place to belong in, where we can speak publicly and gain the support we need
2. Photographically raise awareness in parents and family members of muslimahs who suffer so that they stop making the mistakes that have usually led the pain to escalate
3.Create quality art, in film and photographic pieces that reach out to the public in a century where graphic media is emminent and the most popular form of communication and inspiration for all ages
4. Explain psychiatric vulnerabilities, personal sister stories and educate the (mostly) ignorant muslim community about mental health
5. Link to help by sisters and individuals that i have found helpful, and share my own emotional freedom techniques to heal the pain or learn to cope and live healthier with it
6. Feel the love, hope, healing, and motivation to keep living as i am not dead yet, that this project brings to my own life.

4. Action items :

Connecting is always number 1: what does this picture say to you?

See behind the scenes, what did this look like before?

dont forget to Comment like and share.