On occasion I get some very moving correspondence from people from all walks of life, from all over the world about my videos and writings.

This post is more about the specifics of processing yourself with meditation. I try to answer questions as honestly as I can and shed some light on the phenomena of experiencing regressions, worsening and mental instability caused by meditation practice.

A recent correspondent sent me substantial background story about their mental health situation and the problems they were facing daily. This person found me from my youtube vids and I assume they know about my recovery strategies because this person wanted to know more about it and what to expect.

My answer was very long and detailed and I wanted to share it with other people who have similar questions and issues.

The context of this quote was pertaining to starting a mind-body discipline lifestyle to recover from mental illness. The individual is gainfully employed and desires to be cured/recovered.

“but if I am to commit myself to finding a cure, then I need to have certainty that I am going to get to the destination I am looking for.”

What you asked, I can not do. I can not guarantee for you or anyone that this will work. What is the adage? The only things certain are death and taxes?

There are no guarantees in this work.

In my enthusiasm I have often thought that what I did, anyone can do. I have had time to rethink that stance and I no longer believe that to be so. I was deeply religious growing up and the discipline of prayer and worship prepared me for meditation in my teens. I got a head start on meditation by studying and practicing it when I was 13. Over time I learned more and more meditation systems and paradigms and the body of knowledge I had concerning meditation and the potential of it expanded and grew.

It is important that you understand I was not following anyone’s master plan for mental wellness here. What I did, I did by living one day at a time. By surrendering my long term fate, destiny and planning I was able to live in the present moment and work on being well only for one day at a time. I had no guarantees when I started this. There was no certainty of anything here. I just wanted to survive the day alive and free from restraint. I found that life went wrong when I interacted with people, so I stopped interacting with people as much as possible and life right away got better and less intense.

What happened was very much like walking through fog blind. One hand outstretched, one foot in front of the other. I stopped worrying about tomorrow and just worried about staying alive and calm from sun up to sun down. That was accomplished best by hiking into the park or driving out to a remote area and meditating all day. After awhile it was my routine and I resented having to go to work because work was a distraction from being alone all day. In time I learned to apply meditation to my job. It is much easier to meditate when doing manual labor than it is to meditate when you are talking on the phone in an office all day.

Eventually I was able to transform my life, employed or not, so that meditation pervaded everything I did at all times. I was meditating when I walked to work or rode my bike. I was meditating on lunch break. I meditated at my work station, on the commute back home, on my way down to the park and then in the park all evening.

“You said you meditated for 8 to 12 hours a day with/without tai chi and yoga. Did you do this while maintaining a full time job? Or were you on social security disability at the time? Or did someone else support you? ”

Yes I did do this while maintaining a full time job. Sometimes a job with mandatory overtime which cut into my healing schedule.

I was not on SSD at the time.

In truth, I worked in blue collar industry. Warehousing, shipping, packing, factory work etc. In that industry you might work 9-5, as in 9 pm to 5 am. You might work 60 hours a week, in 5 days with mandatory OT. Sometimes industry down time causes work slowing which meant maybe working only 4 days a week 8 hours a day.

It meant sometimes months long lay offs. I never had the same work schedule for long from age 18 to about age 22. Around age 23 I got employed with a start up company and stayed with them for several years working all manner of shifts, hours etc. At one point I made it clear that I was not available for overtime any more. Not for peer pressure or financial incentive would do I it. I decided my work time was no more than 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, period. After I punched out at 3:30 pm, I was done with work. I did not think about work for one split second longer and I did not bring work home with me. As soon as I was out of the building I was back in my own world and preparing for my evening workout.

There were firings, quittings and layoffs and whenever I found myself without a job I immediately ramped up my practice to full time.

I lived pay check to pay check on the tightest shoe string budgets in order to keep a roof over my head and to eat. Over time I became quite happy and content being poor and alone in the middle of a modern city living the life of an urban recluse.

“I only want to use what works. I need to know what to do to get results. Please tell me exactly what I need to do to cure myself of this paranoia and depression. I need to know. I need to know what to expect on this path.”

As for what to expect on this path? I can not predict that for you. I can only share what happened to me as a result of forging on ahead with my lifestyle ideals.

What happened is as follows.

When I first started out, I was just plain desperate and at wits end. I did not want to be alive but I felt like the Universe was keeping me alive so I decided to endure one more day. Just one more day. Day in and out.

Over time I began to realize that there were small signs of improvement. Better sleep, more relaxation, less anger, less paranoia, less flashbacks, less pain psychically, physically and mentally.

Then I realized that there might be hope for me after all so I dug in and got even more involved with mind body training.

As I gave myself over to this lifestyle I was buoyant about my prospects. I thought there was a possibility for real change and progress. I had no idea what that would mean though. I found out soon enough what the price would entail.

Dark night of the soul.

For a time, all went well and I was walking on air. I was full of hope and energy and positive I could do this. Things were looking better…

At first the meditation had only positive benefits. I was noticeably calmer, more relaxed and genuinely nicer to be around. Everything was going fine. Meditation was working.

Alone without distractions or diversions eventually the only thing I had to face was me. I began to catch clearer glimpses of what was inside me and what I found was not pleasant. Then the content of my own mind, my emotions, my thoughts began to churn anew making a mockery of my feeble new skills.

The closer I got to my real self, the stormier my mind became. I became deeply afraid I was going to walk off a metaphorical mental cliff and become totally unhinged. There was a feeling that I was going down the well and I could not control the thoughts in my mind. There was a tangible internal sense of a kind of impending doom.

Then it passed. A measure of calm was restored. I got a grip as the expression goes. I resumed my practice, wary but relieved. Days went by and I was all zen and tranquility once more.

Then all hell broke loose.

My entry level grace period into meditation was over. I had put in enough to time to gain inner momentum and the ride began to get more intense. My Sunday drive had become a Hellride.

Waves of panic assailed me. I wondered what I had done to open Pandora’s Box. I wondered if I was ever going to be able to close it again. I was relieving my nightmares more intensely than in years. My flashbacks came, untriggered, unasked for constantly as though I was reliving my past on some level all the time.

Years of pain, rage, denial, insecurity, fear, doubt, self loathing, betrayal, revenge, hate, it was all there inside me like a storm cloud that never went away.

That was only the first wave. That process of descending into hell, riding it out, surfacing, gaining a moment of calm only to descend, sometimes plummet back down occurred again and again. Sometimes over the course of months. Sometimes several times in a day.

Eventually all of my worst fears and problems were revisited. The urge to hurt myself or others came at me in visions and compulsions and intrusive thoughts like a transmission I could not turn off. I was alternately floored into deep depression and red lined into deep mania. I was sometimes psychotic and unpsychotic, over and over in the space of minutes like some kid playing with a light switch. Baseless paranoias, obsessions, compulsions, fixations, inner directive and command voices, the angry mob of voices in my head threatening to break down my castle walls.

The years of unprocessed life events had been adding up. The speed at which I had been propelled through childhood into adulthood had left me without enough time to be a proper teen. I had had not a moments rest to really let life catch up and to decompress and unwind from all the stress in my life. Now the interest that accrued on my debt of unfinished business was due and demanding to be paid.

All these thoughts came at me like a hurricane wind without the influence of any meds at all. This core of darkness and chaos was inside me. It was natural. It was what I had become. I had to face my own evil and look at it in the eye while honestly recognizing it for what it was.

During the worst of it, especially when I understood the extent of my *karma* I begged the Universe, God, whatever, to kill me. I was dead serious and I meant it. At my weakest moments I cried out loud to God, to smite me where I was so I would not have to keep screwing up and making life worse for myself and people around me and turning the wheel.

Through all this I made no phone calls for help. I had no internet to check to see if other meditators were going through what I was. I could not count on the guidance of my teachers because their spiritual offerings were paid for with cash and they were not obliged to teach me how to swim in deep waters having already taught me how to tread water in the shallow zones. Many of my teachers had lives and were not available to tutor me because I happened to be in a meditation crises or experiencing a dark night of the soul.

I endured and I persevered. I stuck with it because I had nothing else to do and I was committed to following this path no matter where it led. Underneath all the trauma, hell and sickness was my Original Mind waiting to be uncovered, literally uncovered from the dust and fog of life’s experience, social programming and knowledge that had obscured it. I knew that in theory, my Original Mind was a tabula rasa upon which I could reprogram the code of my personality if I could get there and stay there long enough to access the matrix.

Perhaps you may wonder, how it was I could bear my own madness unbuffered and live in it without respite, not knowing when or if it would end. I was prepared for that when it happened. I had read the lives the Christian saints as a kid. I was in love with St Francis and St Catherine and many others. I remember when Jesus went into the desert to fast and contemplate, he was assailed by no less than Satan. Other saints had been tormented by visions and visitations while praying in their cells.

From the Three Pillars of Zen I read that visions and demons would come to torment me and it was called makyo and you could work through it as several Zen saints have done.

In Taoism there is a warning of the experiencing all the winds of chi, of having the ten thousand experiences but that like clouds, they would come and go, come and go and I had but to dissolve my attachment to them, to let them go.

I also had inspiration, not from real world saints and mystics but by heroes and mystics in stories of science fiction.

I must not fear. Fear is the mind killer, Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

The Bene Gesserit ‘Litany Against Fear’

From the Dune Canon created by Frank Herbert

My only anchor during this was that I knew it had been done by others before me. Before I was even born for that matter. Knowing that it had been done by others, I felt I had to try. I really had no choice in the matter but to go in and nakedly face full on the fury of the voices in the whirlwind.

The Country of the Mind (Boldly going where [you] have never gone before)

Like a spaceship burning up on reentry into the atmosphere I stayed the course and continued to breath and dissolve despite the demons and visions and memories and voices that came to plague me.

In time I punched through the lowest cloud deck of my internal world and for the first time I saw my inner landscape clearly or at least part of it. While I was far from hopeless, it very clear that I had a lot of work to do. An incredible amount of work to do. I had to rediscover myself. I had to find myself and map the surrounding country. Find who and what I was and what I wanted. I had to deprogram myself of everything I had been told was important in life and stay present inside my being when I wanted to be anywhere but here, now.

Now that I was touching down on my home world, I was going to have to live here and make the best of the soil I was standing on.

My soil was toxic and dirty. The contamination ran deep. I knew that if I had continued in my life without taking time off to do this, there was a good chance that I would have passed some point of no return sooner or later and become a homeless bum, jail bait or stuck in a chair in a psych ward muttering to myself endlessly.

Underneath all that, once I kept digging deep enough, I found new soil. (to continue this metaphor. ) I had to do a ton of earth moving to expose more of that soil. The crops of personality that I sowed in that small patch of good soil in me were healthy and strong and a variety that no one had seen from me in years if at all. Meditation had started to change me, for the better, one day at a time.

Meditation grows connections in the Prefrontal Cortex

Of course now we know more about the process of meditation and what actually happens in your brain when you do it for long periods of time. Simply put, you grow a meditation circuit of calmness in your brain and after awhile you continue to give off deep brain wave states even when you are not meditating. Meditation makes use of the brain’s ongoing neuroplasticity to heal and to become denser, healthier and more stable.

The mental state of peace instilled from meditation is at first a lifeline. Then it is a crutch. Then it is cane. Then it is you and you are it. No longer a device to stay upright, you are becoming meditation and meditation is becoming you. In time your calm and peace is who you are and not just something you are striving for.

Eventually you blow away the frame and scaffold around your mind and keep only the practice, ontologically speaking. You become what you do. If you do it long enough, you become a meditator and the mind of a meditator repels neurosis and mental distress. It is resistant to depression. It is stable under pressure. It is a natural psychic armor that protects you from sliding back down again. The longer you stick with it, the harder it is to slide back to what you were because of what you are and what you are becoming.

You will change as a person and you will be different. Life will be different and the meaning and purpose to life will be that much the clearer for you.

That is what happened to me. I can’t say for sure that is what will happen to you. You will have to discover your own Country of the Mind. You have to fly through your inner storms and clouds to find your inner world. You have to map out the features of your inner landscape and your world will not be quite the same as my world. All things being equal, we are still humans with brains performing meditation techniques. These trainings have been successfully transmitted and handed down for generation after generation because they work. They work quite well if you are serious about making it work and you have an open ended commitment to stick with it.

A word of caution about meditation teachers and paid enlightenment

Meditation experiences don’t come on cue in a predictable schedule. They happen when they happen. When these experiences happen it will be because you have prepared your mind and consciousness through repetition, practice and patience. It will be because it is time.

Be highly suspect of any teacher or training that promises to shorten your meditation time or offers a quick path or hidden technique to enlightenment or liberation.

A meditation teacher can only show you the gate. You have to go through it. You have to hack down your inner jungle and blaze your own inner paths. No teacher or system can do that for you. It is going to take as long as it takes.

Neurologically speaking, it takes time to grow those meditation circuits in the brain and no lineage master, no two day meditation seminar at any price can grow that circuit for you. You have to do that yourself. You will get out of it what you put into it. The more you practice, the sooner there are results. The longer you stick with it, the more permanent the benefits.

A note on differences in meditation teachings

I have learned a plethora of meditation techniques over the years. Not all these techniques are designed to heal your emotional and mental problems. There are meditation techniques that exist that presuppose you don’t have any major problems and the purpose of those meditation techniques are to open up the psychic functions and full spiritual capabilities of a person’s being.

If those meditation techniques were taught to say…an enthusiastic but insecure, abused thirteen year old with a natural inclination towards witchcraft and the occult. Without supervision and with regular practice, such a teen could theoretically give themselves a severe case of what is called irregular kundulini awakening or meditation psychosis and no one would be around to notice it.

Such a problem would create symptoms identical to what is known in the DSM as mania. Neither this dedicated but damaged teen, nor anyone else in that teen’s life would know it was happening if they themselves did not know what to look for.

A certain amount of unlearning then, needed to be done. Unlearning of what really constitutes meditation practice and what is genuine meditation practice versus occult training designed to unlock your super powers.

You can hurt yourself with meditation. Some techniques of focusing consciousness exacerbate tendencies towards neurosis, grandiosity and a need for personal power. That path may lead to being really intense but it is a false path to pursue those states purely to possess them.

Years of such meditation practice had done me no lasting good whatsoever. Arguably, they made me worse and insufferable. Since I was unable to make it big in life by pursing power as an end to itself at the age of 22 nearly ten years after my initial exposure to meditation training I decided it was time to change my practice.

Taoist Meditation and Relaxing Into Your Being

If you believe in synchronicities then you should realize that it was no coincidence that I found out I lived only 100 miles away from a master of Taoist arts. Bruce Frantzis is a lineage holder and master of several martial arts, chi gung systems, nei gung and meditation.

I had to save every last scrap of money for weeks to be able to afford to train with him. I attended his lectures, seminars, classes and retreats on Taoist meditation. It was worth every cent.

He teaches a technique called dissolving which uses your awareness to release and resolve not just physical pain, but energy blockages, emotional states, mental triggers, psychic noise and so on.

Day after day, hour after hour, millimeter by millimeter I dissolved myself as bit by bit I gradually learned to relax, to surrender into my being.

I went over each and every trigger and relived some of the most horrible things that had happened to me years after it had happened and I survived many unsupervised, solo explorations into my nightmare past.

This method is very soft and gentle and does not cause explosive catharsis, although catharsis happens. It is a method that I used to free myself from the prison of my inner world. It takes the thorn out of your paw. It defuses the triggers of your ticking emotional bombs.

At first, much energy was spent over-dissolving. I threw a massive amount of energy into dissolving. I had been trained to focus fiercely like a beam and my dissolving was poor quality. I could do it, but it was draining and that draining was not the effortless hallmark of water method, of letting go, of effort without striving. I spent the first year or so dissolving like that. It works but it is hard work and it was not supposed to be.

Then I stumbled upon the trick of causing the dissolving reaction by barely dissolving at all. I went instantly from using 1000 volts of focus to get 1 volt of dissolving to using 1 volt of focus and getting 1000 volts of dissolving from it. It was like a technology breakthrough. When you can join with the mindstream, you can use a minimal amount of energy and the reaction sustains and you can dissolve as long as you wish, without interruption, for hours, days and weeks if you so desire.

You go through the top of your head and you work your way down dissolving everything that comes up no matter what it is. Alternately you can dissolve with a purpose. You can open the scrap book of memory lane, visualize faces or events from your past and deal with stuff you know is going be there.

That is how you catch up your past to your present and finally move on and change.

It gets worse before it gets better

Perhaps one of the scariest yet most thrilling aspects of this was the not knowing who or what I was going to be further down the line as a result of this training. I say ‘further down the line’ and not ‘when it’s over’ because it’s never really over.

In the end I was liberated from my emotional (ptsd) triggers and from my internal suffering, just like the masters said would happen. It works if you follow the directions, give yourself to the discipline, make it your life’s work and stick with it no matter what, especially when it seems like it is making you worse off.

That will happen, You will get worse before you get better. There is no escaping that part. You have to face your demons and memories, all of them. The worst of them. When that happens you will be in physical pain, emotional pain, psychic pain and you will want to quit or even die.

But if you quit while you are in the process of triggering yourself without processing and dissolving the triggers, the pain, the events and emotional connections of those triggers and memories will still be waiting for you , right were you left them like an unfinished conversation with someone on the other line. The work will still need to be done and you are back to square one.

Misidentification of self and responsibility

If you have misidentified yourself as a page from the DSM, you must be ready to surrender your labels and all the ways which you identify yourself as diseased. You have to take 100% full responsibility for your personality. It can not be because of the stars or the planets. It can not be the devil making you do it. It can not be some unknown and unspecified chemical imbalance that makes you the way you are. It can not be God’s will that you were made that way for life.

You must not accept any ideal or paradigm that places the cause and blame for your problems on any agent other than yourself and your past. While it may be true that some past abuser or trauma helped shape the way you are now, if you have physical distance from recurring abuse and trauma, you have a say in how long you will continue to behave in scripted fashions while your strings can be jerked around by anyone that sees them.

You have to forgive yourself for being sick and being weak and for failing. You have to decide that becoming sane in this lifetime, means more to you than anything else. For some folks, only when you are desperate enough to renounce everything in life, everything that you are and do. Only then will you be ready to take full measure and full responsibility for your emotional and mental states and begin making the cognitive and lifestyle changes needed to heal.

In the final analysis, and I have said this before. I think you really need to be in a place of being sick of being sick. You have to be sick of who you are, really ready to change and be different. You will feel yourself changing, You may even walk or talk differently over time. You will change and if you can not imagine yourself as being free of mental illness, I assure you, you never will be.

Will it work for everyone?

I don’t think this can work for everyone. Some folks are perpetually in search of someone who can do the work for them! Some folks for better or for worse would exhaust every option to include medically induced harm in an effort or a hope that someone else could fix them some how some way.

As long you expect other people to perform miracles on you. Or if you are in love with your own suffering. As long as you need your pain and the recurring reminders of past events. As long as you expect healing to come from without as opposed to within then the method I have outlined here may be of limited value to you.

This is a path of inner confrontation and resolution. It is powerful and painful and a lot of hard work. It requires much time and effort on your part to do. If you don’t have the time, or the energy. If you are just not ready, then this path is not for you. If you find yourself on this path and stick with it, you will gain a quiet inner strength that you had no idea you were capable of. You will cultivate it. It will always be there when you need it.

So is this the One True Only Way or what?

Not at all. The phenomena of looking down the barrel of madness is old news. People of all faiths, practices, cultures can have a Dark Night of the Soul or grapple with madness and come out ok.

From a meditation point of view. There is always more than one way to go about a thing. This particular approach worked for me. I do think that learning different meditation paradigms and techniques can be of great value to some people.

Among people who have had some classical training as opposed to people trained solely in the more recent New Age meditation inventions there are subtle nuances and refinements to proper technique. It is worth learning them. Knowing or not knowing them can make a difference in how quickly you progress and whether or not you are progressing at all.

Some folks believe meditation is personal and open to interpretation. They believe meditation is whatever you want it to be. That is an opinion I do not agree with.

Basic confusion over what meditation really is, hence what proper practice should be, is what causes these spin offs to gain some traction amongst other meditators but they may have their own value in their own place. They just do not carry well into the realm of mental health repair.

When it comes to lasting healing benefit, there is the expression about the where the rubber hits the road. I have tried many forms of so-called meditation and they do not all lead to the same place. Not at all.

Almost a year ago I was emailed several times over the course of a few months by people of all ages being abused through involuntary psychiatric hospitalizations.

Many of the nastier stories seemed to come from the U.K. as a result of their Mental Health Act.

It seemed mere rumours of madness are enough to get people involuntary commited for months at a time over there. I figured we had it good here in the U.S.

As time went by I got more and more stories from Floridians and over and over the Baker Act kept coming up

The last straw was an 18 year old woman who complained to me of being Baker Acted a half dozen times a years for years. The lead figures were her mother and her psychologist who whimsically Baker Acted her over and over again.

I decided to do a little digging about the Baker Act and I found a statute every bit as corrosive as the U.K.’s MH Act.

Finally I decided to give a talk about how one might go about beating this Baker Act.

Elsewhere on this blog I have described the events that led to my various hospitalizations.

In all three cases I got myself released.

It occurred to me I might share some of my experiences in being discharged from psychiatric facilities and use that to offset the power of the Baker Act and the helplessness I felt coming from the people corresponding with me.

This is Beating the Baker Act Redux. It completely replaces my old version of this video, ‘Beating the Baker Act: Habeas Corpus and You. It has been totally redone, extended, edited and such.

If you want more details about the topics or events discussed in the video, you can click on the video to get to the youtube page and read the links in the info box. Likewise you can poke around my posts here using the search function and find related posts or pages.

I had some very emotional responses on the video, mostly positive.

On occasion I did get some amusing negative feedback from Florida psych nurses like this nugget.

“I am a nurse who works in florida w/ patients who are Baker Acted. What you are doing is morally wrong. the vast majority of people I take care of are people who in fact need to be protected. I grant to you that there some people that are Baker Acted but don’t need to be. Yet, you are causing more harm than good. When people are Baker Acted they have to show that they are a harm to others. Or harm to themselves. You should feel ashamed.”

Yea, sure ok. I don’t. In this remastered version I cover that criticism.

I stopped by WritheSafely today and read Robin’s post “I will be a good girl”

I missed out on years of college during my 20s either because of recurring bouts of insanity or due to spending my time in isolation practicing tai chi and yoga when I was not working in a factory.

So I feel like a imbecile when politics comes up. Politics of any kind really. I did not take humanities courses and women’s studies so I usually keep my mouth shut about gender politics and feminism so as not to reveal how ignorant I am about these things. I would rather play catch up and read up on it as I go than even pretend I have an ounce of political savvy.

Robin’s post highlighted a concern that was obvious to even such a politically naive creature such as myself. You should read her post to get a better analysis than I could do. In essence, atypical neuroleptics are being sleazily marketed to women that engenders stereotypes about women. You really need to read her post to get a sense of the whole thing. She compares the marketing of yogurt to the marketing of neuroleptics.

Go read her post about it. When you are done, come back and read my rant. This rant has been building for months. Admittedly, reading her post and seeing the Geodon logo catalyzed me to write about the insulting marriage of psychiatric drugs to spiritual wellness and a healthy lifestyle as embodied by the Geodon image.

Welcome to a great big stinking pile of malarky brought to you by Phizer.

I have always been particularly disgusted with the geodon yoga woman for a number of reasons.

The image used to market this drug. The psychology behind that one image. I am trying not to rant here.

When I was on antipsychotics I experienced the death of personality. The strongest portions of my mind and awareness were draining away day by day under the onslaught of a chemical induced lobotomy.

Those drugs leave you fogged, unclear, spaced out with cognitive dulling and delayed reflexes as well as memory problems and a host of neurological problems.

All you get from antipsychotics is damage of the body and mind. It is a toxic substance that kills your spirit. That is what it felt like to me. That is what I experienced under the influence of those drugs.

The involuntary administration of those drugs to mental patients is cost effective means to avoid actual time consuming,cognitive restructuring and personality therapy through psychological means.

It is the easy way out for psychologists/psychiatrists and a fine profit for big pharma.

It is utterly antithetical to yoga and meditation.

Yoga is a means of holistically uniting the mind, body and emotions through what amounts to movement therapy.

It is a mind-body discipline that heals and strengthens both.

Seated meditation as depicted by the ubiquitous lotus position is hard work.

The work of seated meditation involves learning and mastering the mind and thought.

A person in meditation is going deep into their inner world and experiencing their interior universe in order to find the unchanging core of their being.

A person in meditation is learning to understand the energy of thought and the origin of sense of self.

A person in meditation must be brave enough and strong enough to face the whirlwind and personal demons inside themselves.

A person in meditation grapples one on one with their own madness and obsessions and the nature of their own suffering.

To truly meditate the mind must become still and clear while remaining vigilant and focused.

A virtual impossibility on a brain damaging drug.

The meditator does not run from their own mind nor drug it into a fogged stupor with degraded performance.

The meditator that sticks with the practice of going within grows a meditation circuit of stillness that they can rely on.

The meditator relies only on their own hard earned discipline and inner stability to keep themselves from mania, obsession and churning thoughts.

The yoga practitioner and the meditator develop a clean, clear and quiet mind because they do the hard work of going within and reprogramming their mind.

A yoga practitioner does not rely on brain damaging drugs for their mental equilibrium.

A meditator could not progress in spiritual meditation under the influence of antipsychotics. The reason why is as follows.

In order to truly experience your energy and mindstream you can not be on mind altering drugs. If you are, then your perceptions of energy and mind are corrupted by an artificially induced state. To find out who and what you really are you have to be clean and sober. You have to go back to the beginning. People want to think otherwise. They think they can have their pot and enlightenment on the same plate. They think that an entheogenic powered mind voyage will render enlightenment.

Anytime you add any drug to your system you are adding fog and dust on the lens of your inner eye. As that dust accumulates it obscures the real you underneath. I myself have had my share of drugs, meditation and drug induced mind voyages. Invariably hallucinations and mind altering drugs either take you out of your body or your mind produces distortions and illusions. The problem with drug induced enlightenment is that it can not be maintained without taking the drug again and again to get there.

That is not the nature of consciousness. To meditate, you need only what you were born with. To go within and find yourself you need to be clear. Meditation experiences and spiritual awakenings that occur when undrugged are, in my opinion, a better gauge or compass of mental health and spiritual advancement than those discovered on drugs.

Under the influence of neuroleptics, not only can you not find your true self inside, but it will become harder as time goes by.

Under the influence of meditation, no drugs are needed of any kind.

What adds hideous insult to injury is the targeted market indicated by image of the woman in lotus on the yoga mat overlooking the natural panoramic scenery.

The woman in the picture is facing away so she is anonymous. Her appearance and outfit could brand her as the hip-to-healthy lifestyles 20-30 something crowd that sweep into yoga studios after work and on the weekends.

The woman on the yoga mat is on a spiritual journey and life journey. She has traded her latte for a bottle of water. She takes her vitamins and doesn’t smoke. She is going within in order to create inner peace and control over her own mind, thoughts and feelings. With the help of Geodon of course.

The idea of associating a drug proven to cause reduction in brain volume over time with a holistic, healing DIY approach to mind-body wellness is appalling.

The Geodon yoga woman image is beyond disgusting or inappropriate. When I first saw it I was speechless.

The entire idea of going inside your own mind and heart is to allow you to face yourself, your life and this world with a clear mind. The inevitable result of mind-body training is to allow the practitioner to grow mental, emotional and physical strength, focus and relaxation. It allows them to stand on their two feet without the need for chemically straitjacketing the mind or weekly therapy visits.

Yoga is the path to self understanding, Geodon is the path of self destruction. To associate the two is heresy.

I want to clear the air on a few things.

The first thing is an observation. People see what they want to see. Sometimes this filter restricts them from seeing what is actually there.

On my videos, and now here on my blog I have talked about my experiences with mental health services and drugs.

One of the approaches to dealing with mental illness is the psychiatric solution, that solution is management of symptoms through drug therapy.

During my years as a teen, I entered mental health services voluntarily only once. After my suicide attempt by overdose. My paternal grandparents had graciously accepted me into their life and home after I was kicked out the house I grew up in by my stepfather. They were in their late 60s and were at wits end in dealing with my anger, belligerence, depression, bad attitude, confrontational, ill tempered and distance. My suicide attempt was understandably the last straw and my grandmother drove me to a for profit private psychiatric hospital. After my grandparents and my mother gave up their custody rights to the State life proceeded to get even worse.

I now had a social worker from CPS to place me, and when my father’s insurance ran out I was transferred to a state run residential treatment facility for juveniles. From that time forth I had very little rights and very little say over what happened to me.

Over the course of that time frame and afterward I was force medicated with drugs that took me straight to hell. Hell is feeling your mind dying a little each day and watching your lean and fit body decaying into weakness and obesity and being absolutely powerless to stop it. This was the treatment for my diagnosed mental illness. The was the punishment I received because I was suicidal. If it is not clear, let me say that this therapy, this involuntary punishment for my weaknesses did not help me at all. Coupled with the ongoing violence and histrionics of living in places like this. Coupled with my entire family turning their backs on me. I wanted to die even more. My time in mental health services exacerbated every single mental illness inside me. It make more depressed, more manic, more paranoid, more distrustful, more cynical, more desperate, more anxious, more survivalist, more hateful, more suicidal and less physically,mentally, emotionally and spiritually healthy every single day.

I fought for both my release, and my right to refuse consent to medical treatment, (i.e.meds) in court when I was 15 and I won my release from that nightmare. I was pardoned for my mental and social crimes and given a fresh chance in society.

Understandably people sometimes hear me talk about Habeous Corpus, restraints and lock downs, they view my psychiatric medication side effect videos and somehow conclude I am either anti psychiatry or anti drug.

This is my statement regarding those things

I am not anti psychiatry.

I do not have any particular fondness for them, but I am not against psychiatry.

One of my loyal viewers z8tl is always reminding me, “Forgive them, they know not what they do”.

This I have done. I am a scientist at heart. I am too terminally right brained and artistically bent to ever be a good scientist myself but I love science. I want science to figure everything out. I want that. For psychiatry, remember Alfred Nobel? He blew himself up in his lab several times learning the formula for TNT. Marie Curie died of her discoveries. I would rather not see people destroyed by the tentative footsteps taken by psychiatry during the stone age of the science. Maybe psychiatry will be noble some day.

For me it was just a nightmare, a total dead end. Psychiatry hurt me and I can never forget it. I can forgive and move on. For that reason I have and will continue to turn down invitations to join groups, organizations or talk about anti psychiatry ideas or agendas in any way. I am not an anti psychiatry activist. That is not my dharma in this life.

Nor am I anti drug. My stance on drugs is this.

What would you do, how would cope with your mental illness 80 years ago? How did any one cope with mental illness from the Dawn of Man until the 1900 AD? How did people cope? How would you cope without modern pharmaceuticals?

That was me from age 15-25.

After I went off psychiatric medications at the age of 15, my mental illness, which had never gone away, eventually took over me again. And again and again. I can not drink alcohol. I can, but I can not drink much. Not much more than a glass of wine or a beer. Slowly. Otherwise, I get extreme vertigo and I lose psycho motor precision. That makes me feel like a cat without whiskers or tail. I have no grace and I feel overwhelmingly vulnerable if I can not walk a straight line. Alcoholism was not possible for me.

I suffered my internal world every day until I discovered pot. The first time I got really really stoned on pot at the age of 18, I had multiple orgasms without touching myself while lying on the floor. For the first time in my life I was physically and neurologically relaxed from the hypervigilance I had experienced all my life. Like going from DefCon 4 to Nirvana. I just cried the whole time in joy. Marijuana not only relaxed me, but enough of it would silence the voices in my head. When that happened, I could think clearly! The manic hurricane would stop and my thoughts came slow and easy to deal with. Nature’s own benzo. Like any other drug pot has its own side effect profile which must be dealt with if one is to keep a therapeutic blood level of this medication at all times. The other issue is that due to it’s legal classification it is not covered by insurance. It can not be patented so it will never be mass marketed. It can occasionally get you in trouble. That is the price you pay for sanity and function. I was able to make living, pay check to pay check and always had my meds so I would not harm myself or others. It was my social responsibility to make sure I was sufficiently medicated before going to work or out shopping in order to manage my mental illness symptoms.

Like many people on psyche meds or illicit ( not immoral…just not patentable* ) I became dependent. It was a long hard road weaning off my meds. Through full time meditation practice and things like tai chi and yoga, my mind and body both eventually simultaneously became calm and quiet enough to move undrugged though life.

During my quest for optimal health and stress reduction, I moved from a state that had both harsh weather and harsh drug use penalites ( N.H. and M.A. ) to a place with clement weather and where one could obtain a medical prescription for marijuana ( C.A.)

This led to me being able to use my meds while sitting in the warm sun during the winter dodging both Seasonal Affect Disorder and the Immorality Police in the process. This led to overall stress reduction and life satisfaction.

As a result of self medicating with an assortment of drugs in my life. I can not and will never be anti drug. An if the anti pharma move destroys all pills in the world and I can not get codeine for my spinal pain, then I will be grateful I can still eat or smoke a natural herb that has so fortuitously been with us since the Neanderthal age. Here in California, if I chose to turn down pharmaceuticals for my pain because I don’t want to deal with those side effects, I still have a choice of alternative natural drugs available to me with far less social stigma then in other states. In fact if I go to a cannabis dispensary I pay California sales tax on any purchases and the local cops are out front making sure no one is harrassed. California voters have decided that it is simply not worth criminalizing it. I love California.

So no, I am not anti drug, and I am not anti psychiatry. I am pro self healing, self therapy, and I have no patience for those that buy the party line that Bipolar and other axis 1 mood and personality disorders have no known cause or cure. That is just not true.

Mental illness sets in because of a rubiks cube-like assortment of factors mostly relating to stress and personality traits. Unmitigated physical, emotional, mental/cognitive, and spiritual stress, alone or in any combination, causes mental illness.

In chinese medicine terms, energy blockages in your mind body and emotional chi. In our cultural and way of thinking, it’s stress.

You then have to work out each facet, each face of this mind-body puzzle-box until the stress and tension of everything about your life will ease up and release you from your symptoms. All those chemicals become balanced again, naturally. Then you have to work at keeping them there as life changes and stress will always be defacing some of the sides of your Rubiks Cube unless you live in a hole or in retreat at an isolated monastery. To function and interact in this modern world and life in this culture is to be always be facing the possibility even inevitability of mind-body-social stress.

You can’t insure yourself against life happening to you. When life happens you have to be vigilant in order not to lose yourself and your sense of who and what you are. If you have never spent any time unraveling your own heart and mind, then you are lost. You seen an alien in the mirror. You do not know who you, why you are here and what you really want. You have just been existing and pressing onward on the steam of subconscious imperatives and stress overwhelms you and mental illness derails you. You not only are trying to reach mental wellness, you have to finish growing up and discover what you really are.

* what can not be patentable must be made illegal to ensure morally upright and civic minded responsible types have no other choice.