protocols/directions, recognition of self, religious conversion vs. psychosis (collected musings)

the minute someone tells me how I should feel, think or act is when they lose me….

we’re all told how we should feel…if it’s not explicit it’s implicit…people feel wrong all the time solely because they don’t fit into socially accepted norms about how they should feel…many are pathologized and drugged because they don’t feel the way they’re “supposed to”. Boys are told they shouldn’t feel like girls and vice versa. As children we’re told what is acceptable in the way of feeling and what is not. If we are in a family where this happens all the time this can register as trauma and slowly change the brain from the time we’re children away from trusting itself and even knowing what we feel. Most of us, by the time we reach adulthood really don’t know how we feel or what we believe underneath all the negative conditioning we get from society. Remember, we are society too, so we’re all in these deceptive practices together at some point. Unraveling them takes time. Sometimes a lot of time.

In the end we must recognize ourselves. We cannot rely on anyone else to do that. It was our parents job first and they failed. Our parents failed not because they were bad–not because they didn’t love us. They failed because their parents also failed. Hold them in love. Our lineage is everything that we are. Our lineage connects us to the entire human race. We are human and we fail. When it’s our turn we fail our children as well and we fail one another.

And still we can find peace and love with one another too, and that is the paradox of being human. When we find that place where we gently and tenderly feel connected and somehow alike all other sentient life we once again find ourselves…again, it takes time.

***

protocols and directions are for people who have forgotten to listen and thus deeply embody their experience. (all of us in modern society — until we come back to our senses anyway) … Once we know our bodies, protocols and directions are good for starting points, but ultimately we need to fine tune and make whatever we’re doing to heal our own. We are endlessly diverse. Some people may do well with protocols and directions…that’s great if it works out that way (god, don’t I wish)…but many of us need to be able to tweak and say, “nope, not that part of that protocol for this body” …listen, pay attention and respond to our own experience is the task at hand…

(for some reason this capacity and necessity pisses off a lot of people who like to do things by the book and that’s almost everyone. The book is a nice idea…I wish the book worked for me, but once we face almost dying more than once by following said book we do learn to do things differently and we learn to trust that too)

***

Anthropologist Margaret Mead had definite ideas about “the ways to get insight.” She named them as follows: “to study infants, to study animals, to study indigenous people, to be psychoanalyzed, to have a religious conversion and get over it, to have a psychotic episode and get over it.”  – Rob Bresny

this might shock a few people: I would say that religious conversion and psychotic episodes are pretty much the same thing. The religious conversion is socially acceptable (sometimes not embraced wholeheartedly, but not disallowed). The psychotic episode is essentially the opening of one’s own personal mythology instead of a more broadly accepted mythology, which all religions are.  They get violently shut down by people who are afraid. The key thing that Margaret Mead says about the two is that one must get over the phenomena. In that process of working through the mythology (personal or more broadly applied myth – religion)  and then letting go one can find freedom. True freedom is a loss of conditioning in general…

***

For a multitude of ideas about how to create a life filled with safer alternatives to psychiatric drugs visit the drop-down menus at the top of this page or scroll down the homepage for more recent postings.

Support Everything Matters: Beyond Meds. Make a donation with PayPal or Enter Amazon via a link from this blog and do the shopping you’d be doing anyway. No need to purchase the book the link takes you to. Thank you!