Ready?
Fall in love. Right now.
Make yourself like a food you hate.
Intentionally send those panic attacks and depressions packing. Yes, you’ve probably tried to control feelings a few zillion times before, but surely this time will be the charm. …
Open to see cartoon and then links to posts on shadow work.
What media hype and those selling mindfulness don’t tell you is that mindfulness is a process that can radically transform you, and it’s not always safe, nor is it easy or straightforward. We make it safer by being aware of the risks and learning to listen to our own bodies about when it is or isn’t okay for us. No one else actually knows.
We have no memory of being in the womb or emerging from the birth canal. Dreams are quickly forgotten if remembered at all. We experience emotions but may not always know why. The most fundamental dimensions of our experience cannot be found in any solid way, quantified, or even seen. How can we understand spiritual emergencies and other spiritually transformative events if, as R.D. Laing wrote, “We can see other people’s behavior but not their experience?” …
“Change your thinking, change your life.” — that’s a common message and mantra in our new age soaked modern world. Let’s unpack it. There may be some truth to this statement but it’s also far more complex than most people understand.
Anyone who has done any amount of serious meditation will have come to know that we don’t control our thoughts. We don’t control our thoughts or our feelings. Of course, that doesn’t stop us from trying! …
We can hold the horror and the wonder of life at once…it’s a more mature and complex stance than simple happiness. It’s sober and holds wondrousness and beauty right alongside heinousness and pain. …
Did your altered states have spiritual significance or might you be interested in considering how that lens might be applied? Please join us then! We want to create community and support for all of us who’ve experienced madness as having significant spiritual significance. Whether we’ve been psychiatrized or not and whether we’ve considered madness in terms of the psychiatric labeling or not. That would include anyone labeled with psychosis, schizophrenia, bipolar, schizoaffective, or psychotic NOS. That would also include anyone who has had experience with altered states that have not been pathologized by psychiatry, by self or others.
There is a concept of “flow” …or stream entry in Buddhism…when we are moving along with the energetics of NOW…we are in the moment and not burdened by future or past. It is the natural state of *being here now*. (to use Ram Dass’s terminology) I’m proposing (because I’ve experienced it) a sort of flow… Continue Reading →
Sitting with highly reactive feelings is often a highly somatic experience that most people have no framework for and therefore no means to understand what is happening. It can be a very frightening thing to sit with reactive feelings.
It’s strange how it works, or maybe it’s not, but trauma, injury and illness can truly be passageways to waking up and it’s not generally appreciated at all in western medicine which seeks to suppress everything and thus stop that process. Tragic really. Illness/trauma etc as initiation and/or passageway to waking up is also… Continue Reading →
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