The beauty of informal meditation is that there is no line between formal and informal meditation anymore. All of life is an opportunity for mindfulness.
The Beauty of Informal Meditation
A simultaneously devastating and beautiful piece about mothers and mothering.
forget the ideal, the ideal is not real
Like most people, you have ideals, have you not? And the ideal is not real, not factual; it is what should be, it is something in the future. Now, what I say is this: forget the ideal, and be aware of what you are. Do not pursue what should be, but understand what is. The... Continue Reading →
Introduction to psychiatric drug withdrawal syndrome
When you reduce or quit a psychiatric drug, you may experience withdrawal symptoms.
Withdrawal symptoms are due to an absence of a medication at a level to which your body has become accustomed. They are an adverse effect of psychiatric drug use. When the level of the drug is reduced, your body notices it and tries to compensate, creating withdrawal symptoms. Withdrawing faster will increase withdrawal symptoms....
What goes up, must come down…
When an individual has been swept up into the world of symbolic mysteries, nothing comes of it; nothing can come of it, unless it has been associated with the earth, unless it has occurred when that individual was in the body…. Only if you first return to your body, to your earth, can individuation take place; only then does the thing... Continue Reading →
Robert Whitaker’s response to E. Fuller Torrey. About the rationale for forced psychiatric treatment
The logic behind outpatient commitment laws is that antipsychotic medication is a necessary good for people with a diagnosis of severe mental illness. The medications are known to be helpful, but—or so the argument goes—people with “severe mental illness” lack insight into their disease and this is why they reject the medication.
However, if the history of science presented in Anatomy of an Epidemic is correct, antipsychotic medications, over the long term, worsen long-term outcomes in the aggregate, and thus a person refusing to take antipsychotic medications may, in fact, have good medical reason for doing so. And if that is so, the logic for forced treatment collapses.
Thoughts about thinking
Sometimes people think that the point of meditation is to stop thinking -- to have a silent mind. This does happen occasionally, but it is not necessarily the point of meditation. Thoughts are an important part of life, and mindfulness practice is not supposed to be a struggle against them. It's more useful to be... Continue Reading →
Information and inspiration for the chronically ill
This one is for folks living with chronic illnesses of all kinds. I was struck physically ill from the brain-injury and systemic insult incurred by long-term and excessive (prescribed) psychiatric drug use and the subsequent withdrawal from the drugs (iatrogenesis). Many of my symptoms are like that of all sorts of auto-immune and other long-term chronic illness. (CFS, fibromyalgia, etc) These are articles about learning to cope with being seriously ill and also learning to heal from such illness.
the only way out of suffering is to move toward it
Looking back, I can see that my biggest obstacle at the time was that I thought of meditation as something that would help me get rid of the parts of myself that I didn’t like. I sincerely hoped that meditation would lead me to happy, peaceful states of mind where panic and fear could not... Continue Reading →
Befriend your fear
This teaching is in keeping with my practice of being with all that arises within. Fear here can be translated to "anxiety," which is the clinical term for fear which everyone at one time or another experiences with or without a diagnosis of some sort of anxiety "disorder." Psychiatry pathologizes much of the normal human experience and fear and/or anxiety often referred to in Buddhism as such. Normal. There are techniques to learn how to be with these normal feelings, whether they're very intense or not.
The body releases trauma and restores goodness
In a lifetime of working with traumatized individuals, I have been struck by the intrinsic and wedded relationship between trauma and spirituality. With clients suffering from a daunting array of crippling symptoms, I have been privileged to witness profound and authentic transformations. Seemingly out of nowhere, as with Nancy from Chapter 2 who was held... Continue Reading →