#12 from the IT GETS BETTER series JANUARY 10, 2012 I don't often talk about the numerous, odd and often acute aches and pains we who've been harmed by drugs often experience as a result of the iatrogenic damage from taking and then withdrawing from psychiatric drugs. … [click on title to read and view more]
By Matt Licata The aliveness, presence, and connection you are longing for will only ever found in the very center of every feeling, emotion, and sensation you have disowned and disconnected from up until now. The long-lost, orphaned pieces of your achy, tender heart are assembling around you; do you feel them? Listen carefully; open your senses to majestic somatic vastness. Stay close to these ones for they are secret jewels of the darkness. Dare to see that everything here is path that that staying fully embodied to your vulnerability in all its forms is your only yoga now. And that it is through this yoga that the path of metabolization by wild love will unfold and illuminate inside you, bringing your heart alive, and revealing your intimacy with all things. … [click on title to read and view more]
Ekhaya is a Peer Counselor in the Community Links Program in Brooklyn, New York that serves 18 to 25 year old clients, many of whom have had a first episode psychotic break. She works five days a week at Community Links, lives in a small apartment in Harlem and on the weekends takes a bus to Baltimore to spend weekends with her teacher, a Sangoma in the South African lineage. As you will see from Ekhaya’s interview she has come a long way from a history of child abuse through “Psychosis” to become an effective Peer Counselor. Her experience includes attempts at suicide, hospitalization, finding help at a Peer Recovery Center, and finding her spirituality through her African lineage. … [click on title to read and view more]
Community means caring: caring for people. Dietrich Bonhoeffer says: 'He who loves community destroys community: he who loves the brethren builds community.' A community is not an abstract ideal. We are not striving for perfect community. Community is not an ideal: it is people. It is you and I. In community we are called to love people just as they are with their wounds and their gifts, not as we would want them to be. Community means giving them space, helping them to grow. It means also receiving from them so that we too can grow. It is giving each their freedom; it is giving each other trust; it is confirming but also challenging each other. We give dignity to each other by the way we listen to each other, in a spirit of trust and of dying to oneself so that the other may live, grow, and give. … [click on title to read and view more]
Some of the highlights in brief: • Healing as a process of learning to live well. • Anger and other emotions. • The danger of the power of psychiatrists • Iatrogenic illness discussed: illness as the result of a physician’s action • Taking your health into your own hands. • Power of nutrition • Creating community online and Monica’s personal community and more... … [click on title to read and view more]
By Krista MacKinnon I’ve worked in the mental health system for twelve years now, and prior to that was a patient for three. My family was educated to believe that I would be sick my whole life, and that they should have very little hope for my future. When I became a family counsellor, I vowed to never “educate” anyone in such a way. Since then, I’ve watched “Recovery” grow from a subversive whisper to a full-blown growing paradigm in mental health services. Countries have adopted Recovery and implemented its model into their health care planning, academics have studied it and written thousands of articles in peer reviewed journals, organizations have restructured and reorganized their teams to reflect it’s principles, and brave everyday people have told their personal recovery stories to friends, colleagues, conferences, and the media. Recovery is a strong political force, a narrative, a system, a way of life, and a tool. So why then, has this incredible force of “Recovery” not leaked its way over to Family Education? As far as we’ve come (and I mean that as a global community) why are our most intimate loved ones still being educated in old school reductionist ways of thinking about what gets called “mental illness” “Schizophrenia” or “Bipolar Disorder”? Why are there still support groups for families out there where the facilitator thinks it is perfectly okay for families to strategize and brainstorm together ways to sneak their loved ones their medications to “keep them well” or “prevent relapse”? … [click on title to read and view more]
This looks like an EXCELLENT webinar - and it can be free online for non-professionals. This is definitely worth seeing if you or someone you know and love has a trauma history with still-active symptoms. … [click on title to read and view more]
A bit of Rumi to wake up to this morning: Through love bitter things seem sweet. Through love scraps of copper are turned to gold. Through love dregs taste like clear wine. Through love agonies are healing balms. Through love thorns become roses. Through love vinegar becomes rich wine. Through love the scaffold becomes a... Continue Reading →
I find it ironic that practicing simple healthy habits is called "alternative" health and/or medicine.--I'm not using "alternative" health modalities. I'm getting healthy without medication after conventional medical treatment with drugs profoundly wrecked my wellbeing. Our language obfuscates. It's quite Orwellian, in fact.--Getting healthy in my mind means returning to or rediscovering what being in tune with our body/mind and spirit entails. Nothing alternative about that. It's about returning to our animal inheritance. It's foundational to simply being human. … [click on title to read and view more]
If you're really listening, if you're awake to the poignant beauty of the world, your heart breaks regularly. In fact, your heart is made to break; its purpose is to burst open again and again so that it can hold evermore wonders. … [click on title to read and view more]
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