Every time I go back to Potterverse, I can’t help but admire how large an impact does a lot of little details in it have in getting us through the dark times. Maybe that’s why going back to Harry Potter series is always a comfort.
It is crazy how J. K. Rowling could build a world that my heart refuses to believe it as work of fiction. Maybe it exists in real and we don’t know it. But there is something that she has given us in the story which we Muggles could very well practice even though we can’t perform magic. It is about the most ancient and a mysterious charm that conjures a magical guardian, which is formed upon the projection of a most positive feeling – Expecto Patronus. The Patronus charm, as we know, is used to drive off the Dementors.
And what exactly are “Dementors“?
Professor Lupin: “… they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope and happiness out of the air around them.. Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself… soulless and evil. You will be left with nothing but the worst experiences of your life.”
Harry Potter: “And how do you conjure it?”
Professor Lupin: “With an incantation, which will work only if you are concentrating, with all your might, on a single, very happy memory.”
—- Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban
Doesn’t it all sound too familiar? The hooded demonic creatures in Potterverse that drain peace, hope and happiness out of a person is perhaps the invisible anxiety and depression that feeds on our mental decay and despair. The absurd representation it builds in the mind by travestying the life only makes one feel that the suffering is endless.
This isn’t even unreal. One of the basic first remedies that Counselors or any study suggest to battle the anxieties, self-doubt and depression is to maintain a gratitude journal. What exactly does a gratitude journal do?
Gratitude journal does nothing more but help you think of events and things one is thankful for, one is happy that it happened, one cherishes in the mind and maintain a log of it in a book. The journal, when made a task to do, helps one stimulate the thoughts to pin upon positive feelings to fill in the pages, writing about it imprints it further and referring a documented log helps you remember the good things so the Dementors in your head can be fend away.
Anxiety or depression, just like a Dementor feeds on miseries. It makes you focus only over negatives in the life, it trivializes each and every happiness or success that one has achieved over time. Feeding on your shortcomings only makes it stronger and the stronger it becomes, more it drains you out from the inside.
The co-relation of this charm to fend off a grim creature in this book has probably given one of the most important lesson for us to learn i.e. to practice this charm – Expecto Patronus. To rekindle the old magic that’s hidden within us, to master the art of being able to pull out a positive memory even in the worst of times and in front of worst of circumstances to fight the Dementors in the head with the Patronus.
It can get difficult in the start but let us try working on it, and whenever possible, create many more stronger positive memories that we could use it in fighting the dark times.