At age 18 I worked three part time jobs to collect an average of 300$ a week and rented a room in a house in the area. Unfortunately I had to make a decision, I could make a lot more money if I could work in the morning as well the evening, and I wanted more money so with only a few months left of my senior year, I quit school to work full time.

I did not really have any plans once I reached 18. I mean that had been my overriding goal for years, to be 18 and on my own. I had been in survival mode for so long I did know what to do with myself. I ended up looking up all my old friends from years ago. So it was that I spent a lot of my free time just hanging out with my friends. Work was my only responsibility. I actually transferred my jobs again and relocated to live much closer to all my friends.

My emotional state was fairly even for the most part for a little while. Except I was prone to having non specific waves of anger that would possess me for moments to hours on end. That was the first thing to come over me now that I was on my own. Rage at everything and nothing.

Then I discovered pot. My friends had always been really discreet around me with drugs because they all knew I was big into yoga and martial arts and that I refused to take even a pill for a headache. But they would always chide me and tell me “You are too uptight, you are always so serious about everything, you are so intense, you never relax.

You know what, they were right. I was a serious person. I could not relax at all. A permanent state of alarm had rewired my fight or flight reflexes something good. I was always ready. Ready for anything, especially violence I had tension through out all my body and held my stomach in tight all the time braced for impact

finally one day I just said “Screw it pass me that thing, I am an adult, I can make my own decisions and I have decided I want to get stoned and see what its like.”

I did not smoke a little, I smoked a lot. They had plenty. Eventually some of the them passed out upstairs or left but me and my best friend we just sat there smoking more and more. I actually began hallucinating and babbling at one point. It was awesome. I had never felt so relaxed in my entire life. My anger seemed to vanish, I forget I even had anything to be angry over and whatever it was it no longer mattered. I felt great! Feeling good feeling euphoric was something that had never happened to me before. In fact after he finally dragged me onto a couch and through a blanket on me and went to bed, I just lay there and started to cry and had a kind of whole body orgasm. Anyway. smoking pot made the flashbacks go away. It made my rage go away. It helped me become more physically relaxed and it loosened my emotions. It let me sleep long dreamless sleep without nightmares. I loved it. I was an instant stoner from that night on. I hated my consciousness before I discovered pot. I hated being inside myself and being so very intense all the time.

The only problem was that was that having a good supply on me at all times became my main focus. This caused me to kind of bankrupt myself and my work performance suffered. I was having way too much fun being stoned all the time. So I did a lot of temp work, I lost my fast food jobs for tardiness and unexcused absence. I got into temp jobs. After awhile I kind of settled into being a stoner and became a functional drug addict. I was able to keep simple jobs like factory or warehouse work. I did not have to interact with customers or money or public appearance I just had to punch in and do repetitive tasks for twelve hours a day and then I would go home and get stoned.I lived like that for quite a while. The upshot of this was that I was actually a happier person than I had been and I made more friends and connections when I was stoned. Before I was a stoner I was anti social and kept to myself but now I found myself dealing some pot to to pay for my habit and as a dealer I became even more popular and now I was getting invited to parties and had a lot of dates and it was generally a good time.I felt like I was making up for my lost childhood and teenager years. Towards the end of the year as the winter came on a series of events brought on depression for the first time in years.

It started with a bunch of my friends all leaving for California or other parts of the country almost all at once.Then my beloved sports car’s engine blew up but because I was spending my money like crazy and smoked so much pot I could not repair my car.Unable to drive to work, I lost my job and then ran out of pot and money and the rent was due. My lover left me then because I was clearly a train wreck in progress. All these losses put me in a deep despair, unable to avoid reality with pot I was just overwhelmed with alternate bouts of rage and and depression. I used the last of my money to buy another car and lived in it for a few weeks chasing temp jobs.

Finally I got so depressed I wanted out. I could not stand it anymore. As I looked back my whole life seemed tragic and I hated my life and myself. It served no purpose to continue so I tried to kill myself using a hose and back fitting to the exhaust and venting it into my car. Unfortunately the hose melted, enraged I drove to a nearby pharmacy and bought a bottle of Nyquil and some Southern Comfort and went back in my apartment which I was due to get evicted from in two weeks, and tried to OD. But I woke up 14 hours later fine.

Then I ran out on the lake and tried stomping on the ice to see if it would break under me but it was much too thick already.

Finally I called all my relatives as a last resort and I was able to get picked up and moved and was given some starter cash like 600 $ for food and to rent a room for a month back in the city. I decided to try to stay alive one more year. I wanted to drive again. I wanted to smoke pot again.

So I did get work again. I worked very hard. I threw myself into working and I ended up with three jobs again. I worked a janitor at an office complex, as a driver for a warehouse and as a cashier at a gas station. I worked some 60- 70 hours a week. Working became my life. I did start smoking pot again, and could now easily afford it, but I did not smoke as much as before, I was too busy.

I worked like that for months until I got a job as a quality control inspector at a machine screw plant and finally had a good paying nine to five job with benefits and the works. All the bills were paid. I had my pot and ate well and I got my car on the road and I achieved a measure of satisfaction.

I was almost 20 years old. I had a rocky start but I was adapting to this whole being an adult thing. It felt good to pull into a coffee store drive through and order a coffee and croissant and eat my breakfast in my car and drink coffee as I drove to work smoking a cigarette listening to music.I get there, park, punch in and start my job. I got this handled.

Well about around the middle of winter, I got depressed again and it was a deep dark despair that just crept into every cell of my body. Even though things on the outside were fine, I was functioning, I had a job I paid my taxes. On the inside I had all this internal content of rage combined with fear, insecurity, bitterness, hatred, self loathing. As life went on my thoughts would just seethe and churn and I began reliving some of the nastier things that had happened to me during my childhood and teens. I was slowly falling apart. The downward spiral was controlled in part by imposing my will on myself to keep my job and by smoking a lot of pot after every work day But down I went.

I was experiencing a nervous breakdown.I would just start crying for no reason at all. I began having anxiety attacks, vivid violent dreams and daily cycling of hypomania and depression with that constant rage going on underneath it all. I had such a high tolerance to pot that I needed vast amounts to get to that state of intense uncaring, euphoric happiness that quieted the voices in my head and calmed me down. I was finally saving money and had myself on a drug budget. So I could only binge on pot once a week. The rest of the time I would smoke just enough to take the immediate edge off.

Finally I had had enough really and truly enough. I was physically , emotionally, mentally exhausted. So I planned out my end, weeks in advance. I quit my job, packed my things, wrapped up my affairs and wrote out my will. I took a week to drop by old friends and hang out one last time. I took a few days and did nothing but drive the back roads of New Hampshire and Massachusettes for hours and hours just burning gas, smoking cigarettes at a leisurely pace, listening to music, and saying goodbye to the places I once knew.

Upon reflection, my last week was about as good as any I had had in awhile. I was actually pretty relaxed. I can not say for sure how it goes with other suicidals. When I decided that I was going to kill myself for real, a great relief came over me. It made me almost cheerful. A couple of things were going to happen. For one, I was going to get a much needed break. All my cares were going away and nothing mattered to me all. I actually felt a great weight lift from me. No more stress. No more reality. No more pain. No more sensation. No more of my mind. I was going to get some rest. Where I was going, no one would ever harm me or have power over me again. I longed for that. It was all going to be over soon.
I spent my last days as a model citizen. I broke no laws. I didn’t want any attention from anyone. I drove the speed limit. I smiled at everyone and looked everyone I met in the eye.

I left no clues, no despondent phone calls to friends or relatives, no attention getting behavior, no acting out. Only to one person did I telegraph my intent to intentionally. I felt like a moron when I asked him but after having a little beer and pot and rambling about inconsequential things, I asked him out of the blue with a totally straight face “Hey, if I left (New Hampshire)and never came back, would you miss me?” He admitted that he would and then asked me ” Are you planning on bailing?” To this I replied that I was kicking the idea around. That was it.

I had a few ideas about how I wanted to go. For most of my life I had been studying some form of religion or philosophy and I was particularly fond of eastern mysticism. There was two things to consider. The first was dying a good death, the second was leave no trauma.

In the past I have been criticized for not simply shooting myself in the head. Most of the people in the violent suicide solution camp do not have the same spiritual beliefs I have or had at the time..

I did not want to injure or upset my soul. I believed from my studies, that the soul was essentially rooted in the body. I believed that your awareness was the access point to the soul and that emotions, thoughts and feelings were the result of the soul ‘owning’ a body. I had had some long sustained assaults on my sanity as a child along with violent physical abuse and stress. I felt that my death should be a calm , cool, organized, calculated and dignified end. I wanted peace. I wanted to fade to black. I wanted people who saw my face in death to see composure and serenity.

This was also an act of control. All my life at that point it seemed as though people would not leave me alone. From the moment I was old enough to comprehend what was going on around me, I have felt as though I was in a struggle for power with people.

The list of people that have tried to harm me and manipulate me and control me spanned my entire life and the things people have done to me and tried to do to me left with me with no faith in humanity at all. In psychology they speak of developing ‘Basic Trust’ in which children learn their relationships with others, initially their parents and family, and develop a sense of being safe and the idea that people are basically ‘good’.

I never gained Basic Trust. I had spent my whole life fearing other people. I spent most of the first sixteen years of my life living with mentally disturbed people, The only time I could ever feel safe, was to walk on foot miles into the woods, near mountains, Once I got like a few miles away from the nearest human being, I could let down my guard a little. I was so, so deeply tired of this.

So the idea of a self inflicted gun shot wound, falling from a tall building, driving off a cliff or into a wall at high speed, throwing myself onto an expressway, none of those had any appeal to me for a few reasons.

The first reason, people have occasionally survived violent suicide only to live out their lives worse then they were before the tried.

The second reason was that I did not want to inconvenience much less traumatize anybody by my suicide. The idea of having my body fall off a building in front of a passerby did not appeal to me. Having the people discover my blood and brains all over the place from stabbing myself or shooting myself, did not appeal to me. I didn’t want people to think I went out in scream or a rage or impulse. I wanted people to know that my death was deliberate and that I simply passed away quietly.

Although I had on occasion deliberately cut myself with blades before, I did not want to die from blood loss. At that time of course I believed that the soul permeated every cell of our bodies, including blood and fluids in the body. So to me, every drop of blood was essentially irradiated by spirit. I did not want all my blood to pour into the ground or to go down household plumbing fixtures. It is my belief that the best place for a person’s blood to be when they die is in their body. As a means of death, the idea of feeling my life literally pour out of my body was incredibly seductive, ultimately I chose not to.

The third reason. My body had never done me any harm, whereas I had abused and punished my body considerably. My brain, broken and malfunctioning though it was, was precious to me. My head was where I lived during the worst times, and has provided me with rich imaginary worlds to lose myself in. My brain had also granted me visions and other psychic experiences. I did not want to rip my body apart in any fashion, nor did I want to damage my skull or brain in any way.

The fourth reason. I firmly believed that the best way to really leave this world and move on would be to die peacefully. I believed that if I died in a violent or shocking manner, it could possibly cause a loss of cohesion of the spirit upon death and that the I could become disoriented or even lost. That could lead to being a ghost and being bound to earth or specifically to the location I died, doomed to play the moment of my death over and over through time or haunting the lives of people I had known.So violent suicide was out of the question.

This also applies to death by blood loss in the second paragraph of Reason #2. Since the spirit is in the blood, if a large portion of my entire blood supply were to leave my body and become separated by distance, a part of my soul would go with it. So my reasoning was that I wanted all of my spirit to transition out and if my blood were to spill into the ground it would leave a psychic memory imprint or psychometric event and I did not want that.

That pretty much made death by chemical overdose the most attractive solution. I had tried suicide by overdose before with no success. However I was in my teens, and being manic depressive, I did not really think it through. At age 14, and age 18 I tried to OD. The first time by using a mere handful of random pills from the medicine cabinet and the second by drinking down an entire bottle of Benadryl.

In both instances I simply fell asleep for a long time. The first time I slept for about fourteen hours, the second for almost twenty-four. There were no short or long term effects.

However this time I was serious. Back in 1995 the internet was not as useful as it is today of course. The only time I had seen the internet was at a friend’s dorm at the University of New Hampshire. It was certainly nowhere as big and powerful as it is today. So basically I had to do old fashioned research to get the data I needed.

I visited a number of libraries until I found the book I wanted. ‘Final Exit’ by Derek Humphries. Armed with a notebook and pen, I started studying.

It was looking like sleeping pills was going to be the way to go, but I also needed to bulletproof my plan. I took an entire week to assemble my suicide kit. In order to avoid suspicion, I bought only one box of sleeping pills at a time, and I went to several different drug stores to get my pills.

You see, I would have gladly used high powered prescription meds but I had not the slightest means of getting them. When I left the custody of the State at age 18, I lost my health coverage. I had no doctor, no nurse friends, no psychologist. There simply was no way to get them, I had no ‘black market’ contacts that could get me what I wanted.

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The plan was as follows.

Death by overwhelming overdose of antihistamine, causing central nervous system depression then cardiac arrhythmia.

Death by ingestion of toxic levels of ethylene glycol (anti-freeze) leading to heart failure.

Death by hypothermia. According to N.H. government websites dealing with tourism, the average temperature for March is 32 degrees F.

Death by asphyxiation after securing the bag on my head as I was became sleepy.

First I slowly accumulated 4000 mg of dyphenhydramine (from over the counter sleep aids and decongestants) over a weeks time.
Then I drank a 12 oz glass bottle of papaya juice , leaving approximately one ounce remaining for flavor, I filled the bottle with fresh clean anti freeze purchased from an auto parts store.

Then I experimented with some plastic bags until I found some that seemed reliable, and proper sized rubber bands to secure them in place.

First I would take some Dramamine an hour before, this would hopefully prevent nausea and vomiting.

Then, at zero hour, I would consume almost 200 sleeping pills, and chase them with anti-freeze. From what I had read, the 100 sleeping pill suicide sometimes worked, and sometimes did not. I did not want to leave it to chance and this was an overdose, so. I had also read that some 2 oz of ethylene glycol could kill a medium sized dog and that people had been murdered by being poisoned by anti freeze, so I was fairly sure 10-11 oz would do the trick. Both the diphendyramine and ethylene glycol’s fatal toxic effects were supposedly central nervous system depression leading to cardiac arrhythmia. A two pronged chemical assault on my body.

From what I could project, I would fall asleep between 15-45 minutes after ingestion and never wake up. To further bulletproof this attempt, I planned to stay fully aware and present and when I got sleepy, I would fasten a plastic bag over my head and secure it with rubber bands around my neck.

At this point I felt there was only one possible flaw in my plan. I had no idea how fast I would fall asleep. If sleep came upon me suddenly, then it was possible I would fail to put on the bag.

But there was one more possibility. At night the temperatures would drop to just below freezing and I believed it was possible that I could die of exposure. From what I had researched in outdoor weather survival guides, once my bodycore temperature dropped below a certain temperature, hypothermia would set in and unless treated, I would simply shutdown. The combination of overdosing on my CNS cocktail, and sitting in my car, with the windows down while wearing light clothing in 30 degree weather for eight hours or more, should do the trick.

During my research I found that drinking alcohol can make one even more vulnerable to hypothermia. As it turns out, ethylene glycol is very similar to alcohol in its effects, so I assumed it would help the onset of hypothermia.

I also wondered at the time if exposure alone would do the trick, I could just toss down ten sleeping pills, and go to sleep and die from the cold alone. But I did not want to take the risk.

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After spending a week taking a vacation, relaxing and hanging out with old friends, the time had finally come.

Around 5:00 pm, I went and had my last meal.

At about 6:00 pm I began to drive towards the place I had picked out.

At approximately 6:30 pm, I was installed in the place I had picked. I had driven my car to a secluded area off the road and parked in a grove of pine trees and I was unlikely to be noticed here until daylight. I was not planning on seeing daylight again, so that was fine. I sat on the roof of my car and just stared at the stars for awhile, quietly meditating, Soon I was going to know the answer to a question that had been bothering me since I was about five years old. What happens when you die?

At 7:00 pm I took some dramamine and continued to relax, meditate and stay present.

Around 7:30 I began popping some 180 sleeping pills out of their foil and plastic and assembling them into one container.

Approximately 7:45, it occurs to me to write a note to the police and medics telling them who I was, what I had done and how. As I do this I smoke a little bit of a joint I had rolled. I did not want to be stoned out of my mind for my death experience but a few puffs took the edge of the anxiety waves that had started to pulse through me.

At 8:00 pm I began to swallow the pills in small handfuls, washing them down with either a nip from the anti freeze, fruit juice, or water. After the first 100 pills two things start happening. The first is that my throat is literally closing up, I can not get the pills past the back of my mouth and my hands have begun shaking intensely. As quickly as I can, I cast about my car for some object that could serves as a pestle and began grinding the remaining 80 or so pills into a giant pile of powder which I pour into my fruit juice while stirring and shaking the mixture rapidly.

This mixture tastes absolutely horrible, drinking it was really the hardest part of the ordeal.

At approximately 8:20 pm I have consumed most of the contents of the sleeping pill mix and the antifreeze. There is about a 1/8 inch paste of undissolved antihistamine at the bottom of the one bottle, and about 2-3 ounces of antifreeze left in the other.

Around 8:30 pm my stomach heaved once but I did not vomit. A mild sense of lethargy came over me then.

A few minutes later, an overwhelming sense of personal doom washed over me and I felt as though my body had just realized that it had been seriously damaged. I looked at myself in the rear view mirror and whispered “you are dying”. A moment of fear and anxiety swept through all my cells. I wrapped my arms around myself, began rocking slowly back and forth and whispering, as a mother might to her child, “shhhhh it’s ok”, over and over again.

Suddenly my life began flashing in front of my eyes. In a matter of seconds I glimpsed the breadth and depth of my 20 years and realized that this was for the best. I surrendered to the dying and a deep and profound calm came over me.

I smoked my last cigarette and stared out the window breathing deeply and slowly, waiting for the sleep to come. My police note was under my windshield wiper blade and my will in which I named my brother the executor, was on the passenger seat. A plastic bag contained all the evidence from my suicide kit.

At approximately 8:45 pm I desperately needed to urinate, so I stepped out of my car and took care of that. As I walked back to my car, my senses were assaulted by intense audio and visual hallucinations unlike any I have ever experience before or since. Wherever I saw shadow was inky moving shapes of black, distant lights seemed impossibly bright and vivid. Words fail me describing the audio hallucinations but if you have ever recreationally used nitrous oxide, it is similar although far more powerful than the ‘ Wa Wa Wa Wa’ you get from that. In addition I kept hearing a sound similar to that of a rock or small hard object thrown down the length of a metal or cement tube.

Distance was distorted and I was having trouble walking. I tried to focus all my will on walking the last couple of steps to my car. I don’t think I made it. All I can remember from that moment was that someone had suddenly turned up gravity. Blackness came out of nowhere and I could now barely see. I felt so heavy, and so tired. My car door was open, my seat was beckoning, I was so close. I could feel myself collapsing as in slow motion, but I don’t remember hitting the ground.

Well. I woke up in a hospital with tubes coming out of my hands and arms, I had nearly died that night and had been in a temporary coma. To this day there is a complete gap in my mind covering the time after I lost consciousness to when I awoke a few days later.

After I was I medically cleared I was wheeled upstairs to the psychiatric wing for observation. I spent seven days there convincing everyone that I had had just a spell of depression and that I was fine. As soon as I got out of here I would go back to work business as usual. But what I really intended was to try to kill myself again. I convinced everyone except one woman. A nurse that had been working the psych ward for years. As I was preparing to walk out on the seventh day she confided in me.

“Legally we can not hold you because you do not appear to in immediate danger to yourself or others. But I read your suicide note and your will. You were and I suspect still are deeply hurting inside and I know your suicide attempt was serious. You should consider yourself lucky you did not critically or permanently damage your internal organs. But my guess is sooner or later you will try again, sooner or later you will succeed.”

All this I explained in this video, ‘Why I am still alive’. In that video I explain how not to commit suicide and how I screwed it up. In this video followup ‘The Aftermath’ I explain what happened to me after I woke up in the hospital and why I did not immediately try to commit suicide again. There was some close moments between this nurse and I and it was both hard to write about and hard to talk about it.

She was right. But I left anyway. During the following days I spent in retreat at my friends house in a wooded and rural area. For days I just sat there on a wooden bench swing and just stared at the fields and trees meditating. I felt actually quite peaceful. I felt like I had a new lease on life. I also realized that this having nothing to do but meditate on the horizon was incredibly therapeutic. After about two weeks of sitting very still and quiet for hours a day I made up my mind. I would get a job, make some money, move out to California get a job and a place to live, get my economy back and start living a more spiritual life. From now on I would live one day at a time and really experience every moment of every day.

Four months later I did these things. I sold my car and most of my belongings and took a bus to California where I have lived ever since.

It took about six months to get stable. During that time I lived where I could afford and worked any job. I could I lived incredibly poorly the cost of living increase from rural New Hampshire to urban California was incredible. My initial struggle was just making enough money to survive. I briefly got depressed to the point of suicide but I refused to act on it. I had survived once and felt that there must be some sort of strange cosmic destiny or karma going on so I wanted to see where this was going.,

Then I landed a good paying job working at a factory and I was saved. The job required working overtime. Finally I could just work myself to the bone again and gain humility through hard labor. I did this and another six months went by. I moved into a far superior apartment and as luck would have it I could bike to work in 20 minutes and a huge sprawling state park wrapped around the Sacramento river was but a five minute walk from my apartment.

Every single day I would get up and do a quick workout, sit in my throne chair, sit quitely and drink coffee and smoke cigarettes for an hour in the dim light before biking to work. Every day after work I did it again in reverse. I would come home.Then I would smoke a small amount of pot, eat dinner, then I would sit quietly in my chair and stare out the window smoking until it got dark. Then I would turn on a light , do some reading and go to bed. I lived that ritual for months and it was very stabilizing and it was the best way I knew to remain calm and peaceful.

One day I was rereading a book on yoga and for some reason for the first time I really noticed the sales pitch for meditation. The idea of going inside learning yourself and healing your self spiritually.Previously I had been involved with Zen and Kundulini meditation but I practiced them to increase my psychic abilities and to try to cause psychic experiences a practice that I had stopped after my last suicide attempt. As I began going through my expansive personal library on martial arts, chinese medicine, yoga and the occult I became enamored of them all again.

As I poured through all the literature on meditation that I had I saw again and again the same theme, The notion that through meditation, one could know one’s self and gain inner peace and spiritual clarity. Strange that I had not really noticed it before. I decided then that I now had a new life goal. I was going to learn to meditate for real and practice all the ancient and new age therapies until I found a way to understand myself.

As lofty as that goal may sound to some, there was not much else I wanted to do with my life. My life had no meaning I needed to find a meaning and reason to live. I had to find a way to process all that had happened to me during my life and find a way to get over it all. I had no career. I had been depressed all my life and assumed I would die before i was 21. People who are planning on dying young are not inclined to plan for a future.

There was no career planning in my childhood. I moved around so much and lived in so many places my schooling and my childhood were both interrupted all the time. When I turned 18 I just wanted to catch my breath live and just live. But I had got caught up in being an adult so fast and so totally. I lacked a lot of social skills, independent living skills.

Whether I was manic, depressed or stoned I managed my money very poorly, I was always buying things in this live in the moment lifestyle that does not think about the bills at the end of the week. So economic savings was very hard for me. The whole idea..save money for what? What if I die today or tomorrow? Besides what was the point of pursing a career? I was originally raised with the cultural imperative that I would one day settle down and have a family after going to college, getting a degree and a career.

Raise a family? Me? Ha! If anyone had no right to breed from the moment they was born it was me. I was a walking study of axis 1 disorders and physical problems. I had been sickly as a kid prone to getting colds and fevers. My family had a history of mid to late life body problems like gall stones, kidney stones, heart problems, intestinal problems, hernias, depression, urinary tract problems, tumors, high cholesterol, and almost of everyone in my family from both the maternal and paternal lines had vision problems. We all wore glasses. Add to the fact that apparently manic depression and schizophrenia is showing up in me, my mother and my siblings. There was no way I was going to inflict all that on some unsuspecting soul

. Add to that my parenting influences. I tried to imagine what would happen if I caught my kid lying to me or stealing or being defiant and I knew in a heartbeat that my first impulse would be to strike them brutally in the face and for that I knew in my heart that I would be doing the world a favor by not breeding.

With both the burning need for a career and family gone and the fact that I had said goodbye to everyone in my life before my last suicide attempt. I had no family, few friends, no responsibilities to anyone other than myself I was free to pursue anything I pleased and I decided the first order of business was to learn and to practice meditation and see where it led me.

I was trying to figure out how to get started when one day after work I saw a flyer for the opening of a new Aikido dojo in town that featured yoga and tai chi instruction. I began buying every good book on chinese medicine that I didnt already own. I read a lot of inspirational biographies on people that went on these long 20 years spirit quests all over the world in the 60s and 70s and were now writing books about it. I read a lot of books by Dr Andrew Weil and immersed myself in chinese medical theory

I became inspired myself. I quite smoking cigarettes cold turkey. I began drinking large quantities of water every day something I had stopped doing after I went off lithium years ago. I quit drinking soda and anything with high fructose corn syrup. I quit eating red meat. I used to drink about two liters of pepsi, twelve cups of coffee and half a pack to a pack a day of cigarettes every day between age 21 to 22. I never ate vegetables and I ate fast food a lot.

I quit all that and began fasting. I bought some cookbooks and studied nutrition. I experimented with macrobiotics, veganism and vegetarianism for awhile. I began taking multivitamins and other health supplements.

Within two weeks I felt completely different. Within four weeks I started looking different. My skin began to glow and I had more energy all day long.

That dojo became my other home for long time. It was just so uplifting to be in the presence of so many other soul seekers. I studied Tai Chi, Aikido (the way of harmony and energy) and Yoga with teachers and students there nearly every day.

I had new friends now and they were people training to be CMTs or Homeopaths. I got involved with these new age pagans that were into all the spiritual trainings like lightbody and reiki and goddess energy and similar things. Every week I learned and tried some new thing like sound therapy, feng shui, crystal healing and essential oils. I tried it all anything that might help. I trained with a lot of interesting people back then.

As I became healthier and more internally aware one of the first real things I noticed was how much my body hurt all over. , It came my attention all the pains in my soft tissues, my joints and bones, my muscles. My belly hurt if I pressed into it, my thighs hurt, my feet hurt even my eyes hurt. I realized that these pains were not sudden and new but rather I was only now trying to pay attention to my body and this was the status quo and had been for some times. I had been relentlessly self abusive and unforgiving to my body and I looked and felt the last few years, much older than I was. The stress of my life combined with my self abuse behaviors and the poor health habits over the years had caused premature aging, I was getting old fast.

Then a thing happened to me which caused me alarm. While I was at work I elevated something with one arm over my head and my entire arm had a electric shock run through it and my arm literally went cold and numb and locked up and barely dodged this object from crashing down on me.

Deeply insecure about having my body fail like that I did not know what to do. So I took my next pay check and visited a chiropractor I had met at an alternative medicine and healing arts fair.

He took some xrays and as it turned out my skeleton had some problems. A few of my neck vertebrae were slowing fusing and degenerating from physical trauma and car accidents in the past. My floating ribs were fusing with my next lower ribs. My pelvis was tilted and the first rib on both sides at the top of rib cage was fusing with my collarbones.

After listening to a long and candid personal history we both concluded and agreed that either I had some kind of birth defect going on there, or that a combination of physical traumas and internal tensions were causing this. The first few times he made some adjustments to my neck and lower back and wrists and I felt like a new person.Electricity just started shooting all over my body and I felt great. We did a lot of work trying to reintegrate my structure and I got involved with other body work at that time like Rolfing and Feldenkrais. The one thing he could not seem to adjust was my first rib on the right side, the one that was almost touching my collarbone.

As luck would have it of all the therapies I tried tai chi and chi gung proved to be the most powerful. I could not do high level yoga asanas anymore because of all my back problems and practicing the kung fu styles of martial arts hurt my body.. So I temporarily discontinued yoga and kung fu and instead trained more and more chi gung and tai chi.

Shortly after I started chiropractics I had a chance to meet the author of one of the best books on chi gung that was out there. His name was Bruce Kumar Frantzis and he was trained as a chinese doctor and a Taoist priest. He was a master of tai chi,chi gung, taoist meditation and many other arts. He had spent almost 20 years living full time in China, India and Japan and had trained with several of the greatest masters of the martial arts,and chi gung that lived in those times. He taught a system called Taoist Energy Arts. His curriculum included trainings in a variety of chi gung and nei gung exercises,instruction in tai chi and other taoist martial arts, and taoist meditation.

I began training in his system almost exclusively. I learned his chi gung programs and tai chi.chuan. I basically spent all my money to train with him as much as possible. I went to his classes, lectures, seminars and retreats. My whole life centered around practicing tai chi and chi gung.

When I first started trying to meditate in stillness. I found I could not sit still. Sooner or later in five minutes or ten minutes my whole body would just start shaking all over. I would become acutely aware of all the pains and injuries all throughout my body. The longer I tried to sit, the more I would churn on the inside and then all the internal content these waves of hatred and despair, fear and insecurity would just overwhelm me. My mind would start to accelerate dramatically and the internal voices became a cacophony. Well, I was scared. This meditation stuff was powerful business and trying to meditate basically exposed my consciousness to the actual true state of my internal world both physically and emotionally Quite frankly it was too much too soon, I was simply not ready to take on all that simultaneously.

So what I did refocus my goals. Rather than try to force myself through sitting meditation, I would focus on moving meditation. The goal was to learn to relax every inch of my body consciously. While I was practicing tai chi and chi gung, I learned very specific processes for stretching soft tissues and manipulating my internal organs and structure through breathing and precise biomechanical alignments.

I learned a process called Spinal Chi Gung at a retreat with Master Frantzis and he taught me how to manipulate my entire spine. From him I learned how move any vertebrae in my spine at will, He taught me how to move the bones of my pelvis and the plates of my skull. Further he taught me how turn this chi gung set into a spinal pump that I could do whether I was sitting, standing or practicing tai chi. Then he went on to explain the more esoteric refinements from this practice. You could use this spinal pumping wave to control the pulsing of the the fluids of your body at will. This includes the synovial fluids, the blood and the cerebrospinal fluid.

Well I went on to practice this material constantly. Three hours in the morning and three hours in the evening every single day. I still lived from a day to day mindset. Every day I would reaffirm my goal of living a meditation lifestyle. Nothing else mattered but to spend as much of every day as possible in a state of relaxed contemplation. I became a tai chi hippie and somewhat of an eccentric. I got up at 3 or 4 am fully rested and full of energy after five hours of sleep. I would brew a bottle of green tea, pop some vitamins, pack some blueberries in a container and ride my bike down to the park in the dark and practice tai chi and spinal chi gung at the river’s edge every day. I went to work, came home, and did it all over again

. For months I kept this regimen. Then one day my arms, neck and shoulders were on fire. Visible electrical spasms ripped through my neck, my face my hands and arms and chest. Incredible pain and heat and electric shocks kept emanating from my right collarbone and somewhat from my left. My arms were so weak I could not hold a cup of coffee.

My chiropractor put me on disability and I started practicing tai chi and chi gung 8- 10 hours a day.I very carefully learned to extend the spinal pump movements into my ribs until I could move every single rib in my body, fractionally, in almost any direction. Eventually I could acutely feel my ribs coming down and all the soft tissues, tendons and ligaments in my shoulder blades and arm pits were in pain and on fire. I could not longer do tai chi for awhile it was too much. On the other hand the months of long hours of relaxation training, tai chi and chi gung had sufficiently changed the overall tension in my back,hips and legs and I found that my body could now sit still for long periods of time. Indeed it hurt to do anything else.

I could not ride my bike, it hurt to function in the toilet. So all I did was sit in my chair and meditate on relaxing and releasing every vertebrae. rib and joint in my body.

Well, it was not particularly fun. Less so because the longer I spent sitting in stillness mentally, the closer all this internal content was coming out from my subconscious into my ongoing awareness. Sure enough I had flash backs, which triggered more emotions and soon I was literally coming apart at the seams.Only this time I was ready for it all. I just processed this content as it come up.

One moment a feeling of non specific rage or a very specific hurt would present itself and at once I moved my mind into the feelings and dissolved them too. Bit by bit I learned to extend my awareness throughout my body,,emotions and thoughts simultaneously. .Soon enough I began to be completely mindful of my emotional and mental states real time. I could clearly see how one event caused a reaction which caused a memory which triggered a flashback which triggered another set of memories which caused another set of emotions to fire. The links and connections, causes and effects of so many of my problems became more and more transparent to my inner eye.

All the while my body kept giving up tensions accumulated throughout my life. I became more and more relaxed internally and in the process my relaxed concentration grew stronger and stronger.

I will give you an example of how this works. Make a fist with your hand as tight as you can and hold into until you are white knuckled. You may find that maintaining this clenched fist is not particulary comfortable. If you persist you find that your forearm starts to become tense and that this tension soon extends into your shoulder and shoulder blade and then into your neck. You can see that maintaining this tension is not only not good for your soft tissues but that it increases your mental and emotional tension as well. When you relax your grip an wave of release moves through your arm. But you also notice a kind of afterimage of tension in your hand. The tendons in your hand and wrist feel tight moments after.

This kind of tension effect can wreak havoc on your nervous system and most of us, unless blessed with incredible good luck and fortune throughout our lives will have any amount of past physical, emotional and mental tensions essentially stored or imprinted in our bodies and tissue subtly or overtly effecting our overall mental and physical well being.

Now try this again. Clench your fist again tight. As your knuckles start to become white, stop but continuing holding your fist. Now breath into your hand and allow your awareness to move into your fist and coalesce in the center of your palm. While maintaining your prescence, consciously release all tension in the center of your hand by surrendering the space inside your fist. Continue to breath and release over and over and over. What may happen is that your hand will relax and open in stages. As your continue to dissolve, waves of relaxation start to emanate from your open hand up your arm into your shoulder then neck. Soon this physical relaxation begins to relax your emotions and slow down your thoughts as well.

If you keep this up, eventually your entire arm will be bonelessly relaxed and your hand should feel as soft as baby’s. and sense of comfort comes over you. If you continue to dissolve past this total relaxation you may begin to experience past tensions. Tremors may ripple through your hand to your neck. A facial muscle may start twitching. An electrical itch comes and goes from your spine. Then spontaneous memories of injuries to your hand may come over you. Like that time a car door jammed your pinky or when you punched a hole in a wall out of anger and your knuckles were bruised.

As those body memories come over you may experience the emotional accompaniment to the injury itself, like the rage that you felt moments before your punched the wall, and then the events that led to the rage. You stay calm and detached from the experience. You dont dwell on reliving the moment. You neither encourage or discourage the experience nor to try to evade it.You just let it pass and you stay present and continue to concentrate through the entire process. If you do this successfully, the pain in your hand may spontaneously abate. Then the rage will simply evaporate, Then the energy of the past event and all the attendant emotions passes and leaves your conscious awareness never to return. The resultant emotional release leaves you feeling internally calm and well.

The entire process for dissolving a cubic inch of space anywhere inside your body may take a few minutes to several hours or even days. Often once you release one stress another immediately comes forward to take its place. It does not always work.

What happens is that you find some parts of your body and mind and emotions are easier to access and resolve. You may have dark spots in your mind, your hear heart or deep inside a joint or an internal organ that literally repels your mind as your approach it. It’s not time yet for those. You can avoid them until you are stronger there is no hurry.

When meditating I would either just start dissolving with no particular agenda and worked with whatever presented itself. Other times I very specifically worked with certain injuries or memories or past traumas.

Sometimes you find your own mind throwing up all these barriers and smokescreens or waves of feelings start hitting you as your mind approaches a tension in your body or a memory and that recoiling and sense of internal evading is what you are looking for. Waves of anxiety suddenly hit you,you start fidgeting, it is a dead giveaway that there is something that needs to be resolved.

In order to maximize this process you learn and follow a tradition. In the Water Method school of taoist meditation, we typically start at the top of the head and work our way down to our internal organs and pelvis inch by inch..This is the opposite of kundulini meditation.

Over time success breeds success.Your ability to remain in a concentrated, deeply present mental state grows. Without even trying I eventually found myself able to meditate for hours on end with very little apparent external movement on my part, while at the same time my mind was moving millimeter by millimeter down the anterior aspect of my cervical vertebrae and moving them each one by one, pulsing them individually and increasing the space in between each one..

Incidently, this kind of mental practice stops mania cold in its tracks. In fact what happens is that your mind and body achieve an ever evolving homeostasis that is based on relaxed comfort and a clear and still mind. It is like having a kind of anti virus program of the mind. If you are meditating and you experience some past trauma especially a trauma you suffered while you were in a manic phase, you might relive that mania too.

What happens is you perceive thought acceleration and chaotic imagery before it happens. It’s like this. Imagine your whole awareness and body state is like a small clear still mountain pond. Your mind stream is that water. If the smallest insect lands anywhere on this pond it disturbs the surface and sends ripples. If the interior of your mind is mostly calm and clear then you can pinpoint the moment your inner calm is disturbed and apprehend exactly what it was that did it and how,

When you get ‘triggered’ by something, you see it as it happens rather than realize it has happened. The solution is to keep breathing long and slow and focus your presence wherever you felt that disturbance, be it place on your ankle, a pain in your breast or deep inside your brain or heart. You proceed to dissolve that place with your mind just like you did in your hand in that exercise. What will happen is that your stillness becomes the dominant mode and counteracts the mania. Your thoughts speed up, your mind flags the disturbance, you refocus, breathe, relax and release and the thought either slows down, changes to something else or stops altogether. I can not stress enough that you have to have a kind of continuous baseline of mental calm for a long time before you can percieve the onset of mania like that. It takes a lot of work.

At first its frustrating. It is easy to suddenly get caught up in the moment of reliving past trauma. One moment you are fine and under control. The next you have this momentary flash of a suicidal impulse and your whole body feels a thousand pounds heavier. One moment you are fine , the next moment you are crying so hard you are screaming. Another moment you go from calm to such a rage that your face turns red and heart pounds all the while you have not moved an inch. This is just reactions to probing and scanning your past.

The key to resolving anything that causes manic, depressive, angry or even psychotic states is to stay absolutely centered and keep breathing and releasing through it. Eventually you get good at it. After a couple years of doing this 80 hours a week every single day.your mind becomes strong, Your thoughts are under control, your body feels good and well. After awhile you gain facility at this dissolving process and you realize that no matter how much your internal content can destabilize and effect you, there is this core “you” that comes through it clearer,calmer and stronger every time. Eventually this skill leads to confidence in your abilities and you begin to challenge yourself.

Now you start to scan and dissolve all those dark places you initially avoided. Your targets are the most painful memories, the worst times of your life, and the hard healing spots of your body.

You critically examine every single feeling and thought and reaction every waking moment of your life.You examine,resolve and dissolve all your motives, interests, tastes and preferences, likes and dislikes, aversions and attractions, everything.

To use a computer tech style metaphor, you start seriously debugging yourself and you rewrite bad code and change your programming.very deliberately.You know when you have succeeded when the personality ‘errors’ just stop. That is the gauge of success overall. Did your relationship with the trauma or cognitive error change, get worse, stay the same or abate entirely? Any of that can happen. You keep dissolving until the code works properly.

When you really and truly have completely dissolved the content of, say, a bad personal memory,of for example, being assaulted, then the memory no longer has any power over you. It may even feel like it happened to some other person. There is no reaction to the memory, no emotion, no tension, no flashbacks or hallucination or histrionics. You find you can talk about it easily and detachedly. It really becomes history rather than something that continues to exert influence on your mental and emotional wellbeing.

Some people have this natural tendency to believe that certain traumas become permanent. You hear people say things like. ” Oh she will never get over that” or ” He will remain emotionally scarred for life.” or “There will never be closure” For those of you that believe that human beings are that weak and frail, I say to you, should you achieve a state of mental stability and equanimity like I described, you will be wrong.

The are a few things stopping some people from ever ‘getting over it’.

The belief that you can never get over it for one! That whatever happened to you was ‘too much’. to face or cope with. The fear of what getting over it means can prevent you from getting over it. Strongly identifying yourself with your past traumas can predispose you to be reluctant to give them up. “I need my pain! It’s who I am!” if you have the attitude that you are what has happened to you, then no, you will never get over it and you are sentenced for the rest of your life to be scarred by your past..

It is very much like the story of Androcles and the Lion. Once you actually set your self to the task of pulling out the thorn, the internal, mental and emotional pain can be exceedingly intense but afterwards the feeling of relief is so great,that in the final analysis it was worth the trouble of finding and removing the thorn. In our reality we may have a great many thorns or other obstacles to inner peace and each and every one of those thorns must go if you want to be truly free and know yourself.

So that is the task I set for myself, defusin, deprogramming and dethorning myself, as much as I could take, every single day, five to ten hours a day for years.

Eventually I could easily enter a meditative state whether I was working,,eating, reading, practicing tai chi, yoga or sitting in meditation. I eventually went back to work. After months of intensive meditation my spine and ribs stabilized. My back was healed of many problems and my joints and muscles felt light and comfortable. I was able to resume yoga and blue collar work

After a talk with my employers I was able to go from full time to part time work. I barely made enough to pay my bills and eat a lot of really good food and supplements but it was worth the trade off of being able to have to only work 18-24 hours a week and be able to spend the rest of the week meditating and training in tai chi full time.

The main factors that I know helped heal me through this entire process included:

Maintaining a consciously healthful diet, eating organic whenever I could afford it. Drinking a gallon of water a day and taking vitamins and getting enough sleep.

I stopped listening to angry or depressive music,I never watched tv I didn’t even own one for years.

Other than that I stayed away from all my friends.They were mostly stoners and heavy smokers, neurotic and really stressed out all the time. Hanging around them did me no spiritual good at all. I lived alone, an urban recluse.

On the weekends year round it was not unusual for me to sit in the park for 24 to 36 hours at a time meditating. I could tell you about nights lit by an enormous full moon that illuminated everything well enough to see easily.Just sitting there in the moonlight at the waters edge at 2:00 am listening to the bats clicking, the coyotes singing and the sounds of fish jumping out of the water while dissolving my spinal column or pulsing my liver.

That was my life. I did not want to do anything other than live like that for a long time and that is what I did. There was nothing more important to me than becoming clear and the greatest treasure I own today is the peace of mind I won from this.

At first I wanted to deal directly with my anger and depression but as I said it was very difficult due to the neurological background noise of the pains and discomforts in my body. Over the months and years I was able to learn to maintain a state of constant relaxation.

This combined with the healing of my body through the practice of tai chi made me both physically stable and mentally strong enough to focus my awareness inside myself for long periods of time and eventually brought about a great inner calm and stillness. Years of repatterning my nervous system, muscles and soft tissues combined with healthy living changed the outer appearance of my body. A lot of mysterious transient skin problems vanished. My vision,hearing, digestion and skin tone all improved over time. As the tensions left my face and my posture became more relaxed and naturally aligned I became younger .For the next five years every year turned back my clock by a year and so it was that at the age of 25 I looked like I was 20 and felt like I was 15.This is the opposite of earlier when back at age 20 I looked like I was 25 and felt like I was 35

One day, some two years into this regimen, I realized I could not remember the last time I was really angry.The more I thought about it the more I realized I could not remember being depressed this year and in fact, that I also was not depressed the year before when I was just settling into this meditation lifestyle. I was ecstatic this material really was working. I was becoming a new person. I smiled more often. I slept well and my dreams were devoid of nightmares or ill portents. I had not had flashbacks in ages, I no longer woke up out of a sound sleep in the middle of the night whenever a car door slammed on the street.I could not remember my last anxiety attack. I had simply ceased being manic and having these grandiose episodes of directionless creativity and frenetic social or sexual contacts.

You have to bear in mind that I stacked the deck in favor of this happening by both purpose and fortune. I had no friends, no family, no responsibilities to anyone. I eliminated interacting with people altogether as much as possible in order to control for the influence of other people on my mental and emotional stress and well being. I spent most of my time alone and in solitude and that is exactly what I had wanted all my life since I was a little kid. I wanted to be completely and truly left alone. I really believed that I was doing society a favor by choosing to live like this rather than obey all the childhood cultural imperatives about careers and families both of which were things I neither wanted or felt qualified to do

My only responsibility was to myself. When you live alone and meditate all the time like that there is no where to hide from yourself. There are no distractions. Sooner or later you come face to face with everything inside yourself and you deal with it all for better or for worse, one way or the other. You can become consumed by neuroses and anti social madness, which was the path I was on between the age of 18-20, or you can learn to become truly at peace with your inner world and at one with your ongoing conscious awareness.

So what happened was that I continued to train and live like that for the next seven years.I moved a few times and changed jobs a few times but no matter where I went I always reasserted my discipline immediately. In fact the idea of not doing tai chi or meditation every day was like flirting with not taking my ‘meds’.

As the years rolled by the distance between me and my last suicide attempt and the last bout of depression increased. The two years became three, then four, then five and so on..I had freed myself of most of my personal demons and resolved a great many neuroses and maladaptive behaviors.

Taking stock, it has been over twelve years since I had any run ins with law enforcement. It has been over twelve years since I was last hospitalized. It has been over ten years since I have struck anything out of anger or assaulted anyone for annoying or threatening me. It has been over ten years since I last felt suicidal and ten years since I had a depressive phase or episode.

That is not say I have never had a single moment of depression, that would be false. But I have not had any depression lasting longer than a few moments or hours. When my cat and my grandmother passed away I felt a little depressed briefly but that was it. Normal healthy human grief and sorrow cycle, not “oh my god I want to die” or “god hates me” or anything where I just sit by the window and dwell on the sensation of loss for so long I lose my appetite and can not sleep and hover on the verge of tears for days.

What ended up happening is that at one point a few years ago while I was meditating in seclusion was that I had a very powerful and spiritual enlightenment experience occur completely unbidden. I had been meditating about 12-14 hours a day non stop for two weeks when to put it simply, I entered a great stillness and transcendence. I had a face to face encounter with the entirety of my being and I apprehended myself and accepted and surrendered to this process. My entire spine began to shake and it was as though a great sense of light and peace pervaded my entire being and I was at one with everything.My entire life flashed before my eyes and I understood who I was, what I was and what I wanted out of life In that moment I fell in love with myself and truly became capable of loving others for the first time in my life.

As I apprehended myself I became aware of how my inability to recognize my true nature had caused me so many difficulties in my life. Indeed I really had been my own worst enemy for most of my life. The irony of this cosmic joke now understood was so profound that I spontaneously began laughing and crying hysterically. For days afterward I had these recurring bouts of spontaneous laughter and crying. I knew I would never deliberately try to harm myself ever again.

This experienced allowed me to perceive how much of my motivations for so long had been about fear and insecurity.It also resolved the need to relentlessly pursue this training full time,

The changes I had made to my mind and body held and I was able to ramp down from doing this stuff 6-8 hours a day to doing it 2-4 hours a day,without destabilizing my mental, emotional or physical health. So I suddenly had more time on my hands. The need to live like this was over. Now I could get on with other things in my life. But I still didn’t have any idea of what I wanted to do. The only area of expertise in life that I possessed was meditation and self repair. I decided instead to get rewired and dialed in and bought a computer and got back on the internet and have been in a process of self education ever since.

In more recent years I actually went and got my GED finally and took some college classes. Im finally in a relationship after being romantically off limits for ten years. We have a loving and selfless relationship that has lasted now for over three years. This past year I have been drawn to the idea of writing about meditation and depression and so I spend a lot of time researching mental health literature and practicing writing assignments and getting back in touch with the real world.

My life has really changed as a result of meditation..I am going on 33 now and I am really a changed and different human being than I was because of that work.

With regards to mental health I don’t truly know how to call this.

Did I cure myself of bipolar? Was I BP to begin with? Given what we thing we know about manic depression, how is this possible? Whatever happened to “you will have to take medication for the rest of your life and learn to manage your illness and all that ‘pdoc jive’?

Mania,depression, self abuse, compulsive rage suicidal, schizophrenic and anti social tendencies, gone like they were never there. No drugs, no therapy, no social network, no safety net, no religion, no miracles, no supervision and no help.

In the final analysis, I basically used one ‘trick’ for everything. It was merely refinements and permutations of that trick that healed the injuries to my body, resolved the emotional stresses and dysfunctions of my inner most self. The combination of clean living, constant exercise, daily meditation, and the lack of social stresses in my world allowed me to process the content of my entire life at my own pace. I self therapied using these disciplines and have been fairly well balanced for some time now.

As you have you read this I am sure many of have realized how difficult it would be to try to emulate that lifestyle for yourself. I realize that for most people it is probably impractical to drop out of life for ten years and go on a personal spiritual quest. But I can say that that this definitely worked for me. It is a possible solution to mental health problems.

Meditation succeeded where medication failed me. I had nothing but a living nightmare on lithium and perphenazine it was hell quite frankly. Although I smoked marijuana for many years as adult, it never healed me or fundamentally changed anything. I mean it was my panacea for physical pain, for rages, it slowed down mania somewhat and made me forget about being depressed and as such I was able to function in society at subsistence level anyway. Stopping to smoke another joint probably saved me from going to jail or hurting myself or others many times. It really helped me forget about my past long enough to get things done.

In the end smoking pot also became an obstacle to inner peace.and I had to stop if I wanted to really get to the core of my being. Initially smoking a a ‘ritual’ amount of pot before meditation actually helped me sit still and relax. However what happens is that you mentally burn through it after awhile and you are back where you started before you got high.

The ‘buzz’ of being high whether it be a caffeine, nicotine,alcohol or other recreational drug or combination of drugs all produce more neurological background noise and you end up having to straighten back up if you want to penetrate deeply into your mental or emotional being. The reason for this is simple. When you are moving into a profound state of present and relaxed attention you are essentially listening intensely for the slightest change in internal content.The tiniest flicker of emotion, an electrical pulse in your back, or unbidden mental image might suddenly become an access point to penetrate deeper into your consciousness

When you do drugs of any kind, a certain amount of the background noise created by them occludes these infinitesimal micro movements of the mind and they add gaps in your mind stream. Those gaps in your life, in your awareness and mind stream are what you are trying to avoid or repair.

In my experiences in the past I have tried and experimented with drugs and meditation. I have personally tested alcohol, cocaine, methamphetamine. ecstacy, several hallucinogens including acid and mushrooms, cannabinoids, percocets, codeine, vicodin, valium, lorazapam, clonazepam, cyclobenzaprine and many other legal and illegal drugs.

I was a lot more manic back in those days, and I had survived suicide and chemical overdose. I felt I had nothing to lose by trying drugs and seeing if I could find something that might help me cope with life. The irony of this is that I had become this person with no qualms whatsoever about doing any kind of drugs. Once upon a time I was this uptight, self righteous ‘anti-drug’ nazi and as much as told several people in my life to their face that they were weaklings for doing drugs. Now I was one of them.

When I was kid I was terrorfied of these people in psych hospitals that just wanted to push drugs on every single person there it was Orwellian to put it simply. I saw no difference to taking legal and illegal drugs as ‘crutches’ when I was a youth and after my suicide attempt, I saw nothing wrong with taking legal or illegal drugs as crutches as a young adult to deal with reality. My how we all change.

During my research I found that a combination of valium, cannabis and alcohol could cause an artificial state of depression and that methamphetamine and ecstasy can induce artificial mania.

I never found any drug that could replace the therapeutic value of marijuana in regulating my symptoms of manic depression In truth the short term and long term effect of habituated cannabis use are no where near as neurologically dangerous or toxic as the anti depressants, and anti psychotics that have been on the market the last twenty years.

For the most part there were no other drugs I wanted to use more than once or twice with two exceptions, I found lorazapam to be an incredibly seductive medication that I immediately and scarily fell in love with. Combined with cyclobenzaprine. I could attain a chemical state very close to a complete inner peace and mental and physical serenity. The cost of a spending a day or two on those two drugs was a great deal of muscular fatigue and lack of clarity like mental fog but emotionally I felt really stable..

So.if I ever have a major depressive or manic episode again someday or felt like hurting myself or someone, I would probably take those two drugs right away and begin meditating. But for the most part I can not recommend doing drugs and meditating.

The bottom line is that while certain drugs may make entering a basic meditative state easier, you can not progress inward into the deepest recesses of your psyche and your nervous system while you are mentally influenced by drugs.Your baseline state will always be corrupt at a fundamental point where your mind stream begins and you wont be able to contact your nervous system at the basal metabolic level.

At any rate. the point was, I quit smoking pot so I could become totally clear in order to facilitate understanding myself and attaining inner peace.

I don’t know if I could have attained the state of consciousness I attained if I was using any kind mind altering drugs. So, I don’t know if it is possible.

As far as meditation goes. I have studied quite a few traditions and systems and my conclusions are this. Most of what people think is meditation is not really true meditation, its meditative, which is different. A lot of guided imagery and symbolic visualization systems do not deeply effect the underlying mental, emotional or physical states of a person for very long. It is not so much a placebo effect its that, creating visions in your mind is a creative imagination exercise, It has nothing to do with your nervous system and your internal landscape of feelings and sensations.

If you allow yourself to get intensely caught up in visualizations you can definitely change how you feel at the moment. Visualizing a small idyllic scene can take your mind off of stressing thoughts and relax you a little but this does not change the nature of your being anymore than taking anti depressants make you feel better and remove depression but not the underlying reasons for the depression.

To truly meditate you achieve a state of continuous present awareness and yet have all conscious thoughts come to a complete stop in the same mental space. Once you can sustain a state like that, you are close to meditating. With this sustained combination of relaxed attention and no mind, you become quieter and yet more still internally.

At some point, though it may take days, weeks, months, and years, if you are really persistent, then you may have an experience of the mindstream. If you choose to pursue the mind stream and successfully apprehend it simultaneously in this stillness and centered state of awareness, your consciousness will be open to you as deep as you want to go.Should you choose to merge your awareness with your mindstream you may enter a profound great stillness or in yogic language you reach ’samadhi’.

Then and only then are you really meditating.

In my experience there are only a few traditions which teach this experiential, internal, intention centered meditation. Certain specific branches of yoga, zen and taoism contain schools that focus on concentrating awareness and intent to induce meditation. The closest amalgam of those practices in the west is probably ‘Mindfulness Training’ and biofeedback.

You do not have to go join a meditation cult, an ashram or a monastery of any faith, philosophy or persuasion, here in the states or in some remote location in asia.

All you need is the willingness to take as much as time as it takes and to stay true to your goal and your practice no matter what.

For me I had very little social life for a long time. Meditation became for a while more important to me than having a good time with friends, having sex, doing drugs, living wild and crazy or anything else for that matter. I missed out on a lot of culture during this time. My friends all got married and have children now. Some are going back to school or have moved. Relatives I haven’t seen in years have passed on.

Some people just naturally thrive on close social and familial contact. Some people thrive on being with other people all the time. Some people are repelled by the idea of being alone or by one self for any great length of time.

If you have a family or career obligations you may not be able to ever spend the kind of time it takes get involved in spiritual meditation until you retire.

In fact when I was in my early 20s I attended numerous workshops and meditation retreats and invariably I was the youngest person there. All the other attendees were in their 30s 40s,50s 60s and even 70s. A lot of these people especially the older people were at a mid to late life crisis. These people had had children and grandchildren or survived depressions and wars and they were facing the approach of the end of their lives and they wanted to understand the meaning of life and what it was all about. I found that to be so ironic because I too was doing this for same reason, I had faced death and come within an inch of dying and wanted to understand what the point of it all was. I was having my mid and late life crisis in my early 20s.

Real meditation effects brain function and brain chemistry it really does but I have met very few people willing to do what it takes to achieve the state where that happens. There have been studies with MIT and tibetan monks but there still is no real science to how I cured my self of mental illness with meditation anymore than anyone can tell you exactly how people become bipolar and point to a directly linked cause and effect chain of neurons and chemicals in the brain.

All I can say at the end of the day is that it works.