I had never heard of Truehope until the last couple of years. I learned of it from videos and comments on Youtube. I’ve never tried it either. The window of opportunity when that might have interested me came and went a decade ago. Nevertheless people continue to ask my opinions about it so here you go.

During my early twenties I read some books by Dr. Andrew Weil and became interested in nutrition. My first vitamins I ever tried as an adult were these UltraMultiPak vitamins you find on the counter by the register at conveniance stores and gas stations. Later on I became more discerning and discriminating about supplements and tried all kinds of different formulas.

Truly I felt better when I started taking them. I worked a lot of hours back then doing hard physical labor. I smoked and consumed caffeinated and sugared beverage all day. I did a lot of drugs.

When you live like that you can very well become ‘deficient’ and taking a Flintstones children’s vitamin, a Centrum Silver for seniors or even a prenatal multivitamin can help you bear the load of bad habits, indulgence and heavy toxicity. You have more endurance and sleep better when you take a multivitamin and have a stressful, toxic lifestyle.

I tried all kinds of herbs like ginseng, dong quai, black cohosh, ginko biloba, valerian root, lavender, fish oil, St John’s wort. I’ve tried all sorts of stuff like DHEA, pregnenalone, L-triptophan, phenylanaline and melatonin. I jumped on the supplement wagon with both feet right away. In my opinion, supplements can very useful and helpful.

Now let’s take a look at Truehope.  When I first heard about it somebody came to one of my videos and completely off topic leaves the comment “Try Truehope, it cures bipolar.” Honestly after my experiences in healing my own mental health issues and considering the years of hard work and trial and error, I was immediately and rightfully skeptical. That’s what caused me to take a look at the Truehope/EMpower videos on YT.

Let us now take a moment to examine the underlying back story behind Empower.

The story involves a conversation between two Canadian Mormons, Anthony Stephen and David Hardy. The story goes something like this. Mr Stephen, a property manager was complaining to his fellow church goer Mr Hardy about his children’s behavior. Namely some symptoms of ADD and some manic components of bipolar. Mr Hardy, whose experience as a cattle feed salesman informed him, stated that some of these behaviors sounded similar to a condition that occurs to domestic pig farms, Ear and Tail Biting Syndrome.

Mr Hardy offered up that information that introducing vitamins and minerals into pig food seemed to clear up ETBS. Some theorycrafting between the two of these men soon resulted with the conclusion that by introducing vitamins and minerals to Mr Stephen’s children that the human version of Ear and Tail Biting Syndrome might just clear up and what did he have to lose but to try?

Unfortunately, Mr Hardy failed to mention that there is no scientific evidence whatsoever which indicates that ETBS is caused by mineral or vitamin deficiency. In fact, what production pig farmers have found is that ETBS was remedied by changing the taste of the pig feed, by adding or removing pigs from the population and giving pigs toys to play with.

The consensus among production pig farmers is that boredom seems to be the most likely cause of ETBS and shaking up the pigs routine with new stimulus seems to clear ETBS up promptly. Pigs are smart, curious and exploratory. If I was doing time in a pig pen with nothing to interest me I might get irritable too. It makes sense that ETBS is not really a syndrome per se but a pig social and behavioral problem resulting from confinement that clears up for awhile as soon you divert the pigs with something new.

It is true that shotgunning a mix of vitamins and minerals at pigs who demonstrated ETBS has in some cases, cleared up the EBTS in those pigs. However, correlation does not prove causation and there are no concrete scientific studies which validate the mineral deficiency = EBTS theory.

Synergy Group, the company behind Truehope makes several claims about the science behind and manufacturing of their supplement. Let’s examine some of those claims.

The first thing you should know about Synergy Group’s Empower formula is that it contains nearly forty run-of-the mill vitamins and minerals that you can find in many other supplement formulas. During my research for this the first thing I did was to go to the Truehope website where they list the ingredients for Empower.

Synergy Group is not the only company that lists their supplement ingredients. During my research I checked out Centrum formulas like Centrum Silver and Centrum Active. I checked out GNC formulas like Solotron Platinum and Women’s Hair, Skin and Nail formula. I checked out Flintstone’s multivitamin for kids. I checked out a generic prenatal formula sold at Walgreen’s.

The website would have you believe that “EMPowerplus contains a broad spectrum of vitamins and trace minerals in a balance designed specifically for people with mental illnesses”

Synergy Group is Mr Stephen and Mr Hardy and their paid employees, admins and consultants. Syngery Group’s marketing department would have you believe that Mr Stephen whose background is in property managing and Mr Hardy whose background is in sales, have, between the two of them, figured out the precise metabolic and nutritional differences between otherwise healthy people and people with ADHD, schizophrenia, Tourette’s, Bipolar Disorder, Obsessive Compulsive and many more mental health problems.

How do these two guys know what the precise zinc or Vitamin A requirements a person with depression needs? When did these experiments take place? Where is this massive testing population that would have been necessary to determine the exact amount of say, Vitamin B2 or calcium that a bipolar needs versus what someone with ADHD needs versus what a healthy person’s levels are?

The wording of that statement ‘in a balance designed specifically for people with mental illnesses’ implies that these two men have all this information figured out. Empower is claimed to be formulated to remedy the deficiencies caused by bipolar, ADHD and even schizophrenia. When we compare Empower to some of the above multivitamins from other brands we don’t really have huge differences but there are some. Here is just a sample for comparison.

Amount of Biotin per formula.

Empower: 3000mcg
Centrum: 3000mcg
GNC: 30mcg
Flintstone’s: 40mcg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 0mcg

Amount of Vitamin A per formula

Empower: 1536 IU
Centrum: 5000 IU
GNC: 15000 IU
Flintstone’s: 3000 IU
Walgreen’s prenatal: 4000 IU

Amount of Folic Acid (vitamin B9) per formula

Empower: 384 mcg
Centrum:  400 mcg
GNC: 400 mcg
Flintstone’s: 400 mcg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 800 mcg

Amount of Calcium per formula

Empower: 352 mg
Centrum: 1000 mg
GNC: 200 mg
Flintstone’s: 100 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 200 mg

Amount of Riboflavin (Vitamin B2) per formula

Empower: 3.6 mg
Centrum: 1.7 mg
GNC: 35 mg
Flintstone’s:  1.7 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 1.7 mg

Amount of Iron per formula

Empower: 3.7 mg
Centrum:  18 mg
GNC: 10 mg
Flintstone’s: 18 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 28 mg

Amount of Niacin per formula

Empower: 24 mg
Centrum: 20 mg
GNC: 35 mg
Flintstone’s: 15 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 20 mg

Amount of Choline per formula

Empower: ??mcg
Centrum: 0 mcg
GNC: 50 mcg
Flintstone’s: 38 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 0 mcg

Amount of Inositol per formula

Empower ?? mcg
Centrum: 0 mcg
GNC: 50 mcg
Flintstone’s: 0 mcg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 0 mcg

Synergy Group makes the claim that many people who suffer from mental illness may be deficient in vitamins, minerals and amino acids. There seems to be some scientific evidence that backs that up.

Did you know?

There are clinical lab tests, blood and urine analysis which can determine if you truly have a nutritional deficiency. It is not logical to assume you are deficient in anything unless you know that you are not routinely eating balanced nutritious meals.

Before you start stuffing your gullet with overdoses of vitamins and minerals be sure you actually have a deficiency. Otherwise, it is a total waste of money as your body’s natural balancing act will simply flush all the unneeded and excess vitamins and minerals out of your body anyway.

Did you know?

Clinical testing of Empower’s formula has demonstrated that the actual concentration of the supposed specially balanced ingredients can vary as widely as 70% per batch. I suspect that this is not necessarily an EMpower issue and more of an artifact of bulk industrial processing that occurs to other supplements too but still.

Can you imagine if the caffeine in your morning coffee fluctuated as much as 70%? If treated with lithium, can you imagine the lithium fluctuating as much as 70% per dose? If taking morphine for post surgical pain management can you imagine if it fluctuated up to 70% per dose? Can you imagine if the alcohol in good old cheap American beer fluctuated that much per bottle?

Whether we use substances for medical or recreational purpose a 70% variation in potency would be absolutely unacceptable if we are trying to maintain a certain blood level of a chemical to gain it’s effects consistently. Now we are to assume that the efficacy of the carefully selected and balanced Empower formula is just fine with as much as 70% variance?

One supporting claim made by Synergy Group is that the consumer gains more benefit from Empower due to the chelation processing that they put their supplement through which supposedly increases the bioavailability of their formula.

Did you know?

Chelating minerals does in fact make them more bioavailable when the process is done thoroughly.

Did you know?

The chelation process is laborious, time consuming and costly. In bulk industrial processing only a portion of the mixture, anywhere from 50 to 60 percent is properly chelated.

Did you know?

No matter how much chelation a mineral goes through, no matter how bioavailable it is your body can only absorb a certain amount which differs from person to person somewhat. When your body has reached that amount the remainder is passed out through urine and stool within a day or two.

Did you know?

Synergy Group is not the only supplement company that puts their formula through a chelation process. On any given night at the chelation plant, the Empower formula is just one of several lots from different companies being processed. You can find chelated formulas from other suppliers.

Did you know?

The best, most natural bioavailable form of consuming vitamins and minerals takes places in our intestines as our own digestive process naturally chelates the organic compounds in food like broccoli or walnuts or fish or whatever. You don’t actually need chelated formulas, your body can chelate biomolecules just fine.

As I mentioned earlier I am a proponent of nutritional awareness for mental health recovery. I am not trying to encourage or discourage anyone from trying Empower. My advice, if you intend on trying it, would be to first give a few, cheaper, multivitamin formulas a try.

Do an experiment on yourself. Try one multivitamin for four weeks and take notes on how you feel. Try a different multivitamin for another four weeks and take notes on how you feel. You may very well find yourself gaining some mental or emotional benefit from them. Then, if you want to be sure, go ahead and try some Empower for four weeks and see if it makes a difference.

If you feel much better on it than on other supplements you may be on to something. If you notice the benefits are more or less the same as what you were getting from your Other Brand Multivitamin then there is no reason to spend the extra money on Empower.

While the Bipolar Disorder to Ear and Tail Biting Syndrome connection is pretty weak there is some real evidence that vitamin supplementation can help people with mental health issues. The question then becomes, does Syngery Group’s Empower formula really offer you something unique that you can not get elsewhere? The answer is, probably not.

Although their marketing strategy tried to convince you otherwise, we know that there are other, cheaper sources of multivitamin formulas which have gone through chelation processing and have a higher bioavailability of nutrients than ionic or colloidal formulas.

Don’t let the chelation, bioavailability lingo distract you from the facts. No matter how much bioavailable nutrients you consume, there is a limit to how much your body can take before you are overdosing for no real therapeutic reason and you are facing diminishing returns.

So, if Empower is a cure, how long does it take before you are cured? That was one of my first questions. A week? A month? A year? How much of this stuff do you take and for how long until your bipolar or schizophrenia is gone for good?

When I asked one of the youtubers that was pimping Truehope on my videos that question, this was his answer.

“well you take them… just like you eat food, just like you breath, just like you meditate, I thought I already said that, I did. I thought that was a good enough answer.”

Wow. Just…wow. I coaxed this answer out of him after several attempts at asking the question again and again which he continuously evaded as he tried to derail and deflect the conversation in different directions using the time honored distraction of asking me unrelated questions rather than give an honest, simple answer to my question.

Perhaps these random youtube people are just not ideal presenters for this product. Let’s check out the professional customer service representatives with their precise and very carefully worded little scripts and see if they have the answers I was interested in.

I found these tracks and quoted the important stuff.

To be fair, if you listen to the calls you will note that I quoted out of context. I picked the really ‘telling’ statements and put them together because that is how my brain interpreted what I was hearing. The actual statements can be listened to on these tracks or you can backhack the link and get the transcripts from the site itself.

How does EMpower work and how much do you take for how long?

Customer support call for bipolar disorder

“Generally what will happen after you start the EMpower it gets into your body and starts repairing that chemical imbalance a little bit at a time. Generally everyone starts off at 18 (capsules) a day.  That is what we have found through our research that your body needs. Once you have gone three months without symptoms that is when we would begin to find a maintenance dose for you. Generally we see people maintaining at 9-12 per day.” ( About half or slightly less than half of the ‘loading’ dose apparently)

It’s creepy similar to what the psych nurses and my psychiatrist told me in the hospital. I was to start off at the highest doses possible of trilafon and lithium to get me ‘adjusted’ as fast as possible. Reducing dosing would be considered way down the line after I had some number of months on max doses.

The psych nurse who added lithium to the mix a few weeks after the antipsychotic explained the need for it like this.

“You are bipolar. You have a chemical imbalance which causes you to be unable to control your moods from one pole to the other. Lithium will stabilize that chemical imbalance.”

My response was probably a slurred and tired,

“Uh, ok, sure whatever.”

I was told I would never be able to live without medications or I would become ill again. As a teen who was doped out on a neurolpetic I did not have the faculties or critical thinking ability needed to turn back to this psych nurse and say something like,

“Wait, what?”

or

“I beg pardon?”

I did not know what questions to ask.

What happens if you come off EMpower?

Customer support call for depression.

“EMpower corrects the chemical imbalance in the brain by supporting it with vitamins and minerals. If you were ever to come off EMpower your body would no longer have that support. Your original symptoms would return. So, it’s unfortunately, an incurable illness.”

Wait a second. This is also the same story that psychiatrists tell you about your illness and meds. Let’s bring this whole thing to a halt here and start asking some questions.

When the psych nurse told me lithium would stabilize my chemical imbalance, what chemical imbalance are we talking about here? There is no concrete proof that any particular ‘chemical imbalance’ is to blame for bipolar. Was I suffering from a lithium deficiency?

Perhaps she was referring to the thoroughly debunked serotonin and other neurotransmitter ‘deficiency’ theories. Most of the really crappy research done on the serotonin deficiency theories were related to depression. Even if these studies did pan out the ’serotonin deficiency theory’ it certainly does not explain the ‘manic’ aspect of bipolar.

What about the customer reps at Truehope calling centers? Their statements would seem to imply that Syngery Group has a better understanding of these chemical imbalances than Harvard researchers. Right?

Are these Truehope folks even talking about the same chemical imbalances that your psychiatrist told you about? Although they use the term glibly enough the Truehope folks’s definition of a chemical imbalance is a bit different from the definitions of biopsychiatry researchers and pharma companies.

The folks over at Truehope use the ‘Nutrient Theory of mental illness’ That means when these reps are talking about EMpower ‘going in and repairing those imbalances’ they are coming from a point of view that all these mental illness, bipolar, depression, ADHD, anxiety are all caused by vitamin and mineral deficiencies.

Some of you may be familiar with Linus Pauling, two time Nobel prize winner and father of orthomolecular medicine. He did some experiments in which people with various mental health issues were given megadoses of vitamins and noticed improved functioning in some of them.

The ’science’ underpinning Truehope can be boiled down to these summations of the information they are presenting on that website.

A. Mental illness is considered to be a chemical imbalance. Since vitamins and minerals are necessary for proper production of neurotransmitters a deficiency in vitamins and minerals may be the cause of your chemical imbalance.

B. Some scientists theorize that some people have a genetic need for more vitamins and minerals than others. Some scientists have show that some genetic mutations require more vitamins and minerals. We at Truehope have connected all the dots here. People with bipolar, schizophrenia, anxiety disorders, OCD, clinical depression and ADHD are genetic mutants with active deficiencies of vitamins and minerals the specifics and exact amount of which we have figured out and presented as EMpower to fix those deficiencies.

C. The deficiencies of these genetic mutants are causing their brain cells to shrink and die. That has to have some kind of effect.

D. One of our company founders thinks that maybe it’s all about being deficient in a few vitamins and minerals and this causes systemic wide chain reactions which lead to even greater deficiencies or inability to properly uptake some nutrients. Our formula fixes all that stuff no problem because we know exactly what it takes to remedy that.

Oh. Really? Let’s look at an example and see what that means.

Amount of Niacin per formula

Empower: 24 mg
Centrum: 20 mg
GNC: 35 mg
Flintstone’s: 15 mg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 20 mg

Let me get this straight. I am supposed to believe that Mr. Hardy and Mr. Stephen have figured out that people with anxiety disorders, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, OCD and Tourette’s require 24 mg of Niacin? How did they figure that out?

It seems to me that the Centrum and Prenatal formulas are getting awfully close to the levels needed to treat those with genetic deficiencies of niacin. The GNC formula exceeds the amount of niacin needed to successfully treat these bipolars and depressives and their genetic deficiencies.

When we look at other ingredients we find similar levels.

Amount of Folic Acid (vitamin B9) per formula

Empower: 384 mcg
Centrum:  400 mcg
GNC: 400 mcg
Flintstone’s: 400 mcg
Walgreen’s Prenatal: 800 mcg

These guys at Truehope have got it all figured out. For regular folks who are just looking to supplement an active lifestyle 400 mcg of B9 are sufficient. If you have bipolar disorder you really only need 384 mcg of B9.

Remember, the folks at Truehope have balanced their formula specifically to address the chemical imbalances found in those people with genetic mutations which lead them to get mental health labels like ADHD and schizophrenia due to their deficiencies.

The dosing is not a one to one correspondence. The amounts listed consist of a single ’serving’ of EMpower. One serving being four capsules. Their maintenance dosing guidelines would have you taking twice that amount to keep your symptoms at bay. This is after a prolonged period where you actually take four times that amount.

Typically your average multivitamin is taken once or twice a day. “One with every meal” are the instructions on the labels of some of them. If you take two GNC or Centrums daily this is more or less half of EMpower’s ‘maintenance dose’ for a good many of the very same vitamins and minerals.

I am really impressed that these two guys, Mr. Hardy and Mr. Stephen were able on their own to figure out the nutritional requirements imposed on those people with the genetic deficiencies which lead to chemical imbalances which are later diagnosed as ADHD, OCD, manic depression and so on.

What about the makers of GNC and Centrum and Flintstones vitamins? Don’t they realize that by simply doubling the daily supplementation regimen they would probably start getting people calling in to report their schizophrenia is clearing up?

Defenders of EMpower would say no. They would argue that that the chelated bioavailability of EMPower means it is superior to anything GNC or Centrum could do. What is stopping GNC and Centrum from getting into the curing of bipolar disorder business by simply chelating their formulas?

Defenders of EMpower might propose that even with chelation GNC or Centrum formulas still can’t do what EMPower does. Their defense will come down to this. “It’s the Colonel’s Secret Recipe that makes EMpower so good!”

Can we create a knock off of EMpower on our own? We could find a supplement with more or less the same ingredient list as EMpower that chelates their formula. Then we just start picking the other supplements off the shelves.

Purchase some ginkgo, phenylalanine, glutamine, inositol and combine that with a double dose of Centrum Complete and you would be getting very, very close to the formula that EMpower has.

Close enough that if you had bipolar or schizophrenia and you created this formula yourself and experimented on yourself at the dosing levels described by the Truehope customer reps then if you are one of these people with a genetic deficiency than there is a very good chance that you may get some noticeable improvements.

I don’t think that Mr Hardy and Mr Stephen have figured out that kids with ADHD or Tourettes or teens with depression or adults with schizophrenia are all equally handled by ingesting mega doses of certain nutrients.

I don’t believe it frankly. I don’t believe they have the scientific papers, the statistics, the hard data that would indicate that taking 96 mg of niacin daily is what it takes to put schizophrenia in remission. Not 196 mg or 3 mg daily. No. 96 mg.

They would have us believe they have figured out the exact amounts, not only of niacin or folic acid but also the other 38 vitamins and minerals and supporting amino acids.  I don’t believe it. You, as a customer and consumer should at least hesitate to believe it.

It would be really nice if they could post their research findings in the interests of transparency and for the good of medicine. I want to know more about their research protocols other than randomly testing some formulas out on their friends and children. I want to see research data.

They are definitely not forthcoming with how they figured out the precise formulas for the nutritional needs of bipolars. What about kids with Tourettes? Come on. It stinks of bullshit that they are really sitting on information we would hope, gleaned from hard won trial and error and proper double blind studies. We are asked to take it on faith and to accept the very convenient family stories told by Mr Hardy and Mr Stephen.

I figured that if this was a real cure then you would be done with their supplement once your symptoms were gone for a good long while. No way. That would not make any money. It is very telling that these folks use the same language, the exact same language that pharmaceutical companies do when they market psychiatric meds.

“Prozac is one medicine in a class of antidepressants called selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, or SSRIs, that work to fix these chemical imbalances.”

“Abilify, for the mainenance treatment of Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia”

The folks over at Truehope are telling you that your genetic mutation that makes you perpetually deficient in vitamins and minerals is an incurable illness. Discontinue EMpower and it’s back to relapseville for you.

Is that really a cure then? Not in my book it’s not. It’s a treatment in the same vein as psychiatric drugs. A treatment you are never suppose to stop. It’s a healthier alternative to psychiatric meds, that much is sure.

The Truehope marketing department is top notch. They have co-opted the big pharma jargon like ‘chemical imbalance’ and ‘maintenance dose’. They have co-opted the nutritional supplement buzz words like ‘chelated’, ‘bioavailable’ and ‘deficiency’.

Then they take an average multi vitamin supplement. They pack it with a variety of aminos and other compounds that are all the rage in nutrition and health food circles. Supplements that you would normally buy separately. Then they have the formula chelated and voila, they have a very complete, high quality nutritional supplement.

As a supplement, it seems so complete that even I could be tempted by it. Setting aside the misgivings about how consistent this formula is prepared industrially, taking one or two EMpower capsules a day I would be theoretically getting the same things as the combination I get from several different supplements and formulas. Taken at face value, as a health supplement it’s solid.

One thing that bugs me about Truehope is the cheesy ‘feel good ‘ names they call themselves and their stuff. Another thing that bothers me is their one size fits all approach. It’s their claims to being able to fix such an incredibly wide array of mental problems with one supplement. They don’t seem to offer much advice if the stuff does not work. Much like Big Pharma they tell you to keep taking it anyway claiming that the balancing can take months and to bear with it.

It’s terribly disingenuous of them to use the same language as Big Pharma but you know what? Their marketing people know it works. People sees these ads for Celexa, Abilify, Cymbalta or Seroquel and they are readily convinced they have some unspecific chemical imbalance issue which these drugs are going to ‘maintain’ for them. The bullshit meters of the people buying these drugs did not go off after seeing a TV advertisement for psychiatric meds and they are not going off for Truehope either.

To sell nutritional supplements or psychiatric medications you have to tell potential customers why they need those products. You use scare language and convince them they are missing something they need that you have. People get enchanted by buzz words and jargon. People eat them up, pun intended.

Another thing that bugs me about Truehope is those customer reps your heard and the endless streams of bullshit coming out their mouths. Listen to those phone calls and don’t tell me you are not both amused and appalled at what these reps are saying and the Big Picture that is revealed when they talk about the dosing.

They are not selling just hype hope. They are selling fear too. If you uncritically accept what these reps tell you then you may very well be successfully convinced that you have a genetic mutation that means you are subject to perpetual vitamin and mineral deficiency. What you need to do as a critically thinking consumer is to find out if it is really true that you are have this deficiency.

When you think you have True Hope in the palm of your hand you are setting yourself up for the expectation effect, selective thinking, confirmation bias and the placebo effect. If you went to your GP and got some blood work done and the results came in and you did not have any deficiencies and yet you still suffered from depression, bipolar, schizophrenia or whatever, then what? You are back to square one.

If you got that blood work done before you bought EMpower than you know now, instead of guessing whether or not you really have a deficiency genetic or otherwise. I know what you are thinking. That would take all the magic out of it.

Personal anecdote about the power of real hope.

When I was fifteen I lived in a very scary place. I was placed in a lockdown facility, a special school for teens with major emotional and behavioral issues. I had been Dxd with Bipolar 1 and Schizoaffective months earlier. Secretly, I had just stopped taking my meds.

Without the drugs my mental abilities and perceptions came back online. I found the Patient’s Bill of Rights and I learned that I was now of the age of consent to refuse meds legally. I also found out they could not keep me locked up there anymore if I was not being ‘treated’ anymore. It’s called Habeas Corpus.

When I read that I knew there was possibility that I could get out of there. I was living in the company of disturbed sometimes violent teenagers amidst neurotic and occasionally abuse staff. I was in lockdown with very few rights or privileges. It was the middle of winter. My family had given up on me. I had been abandoned, again, this time to psychiatric gulag.

I had every reason in the world to feel hopeless and suicidally depressed and until I read the Patient’s Bill of Rights I was secretly massively suicidally depressed and unbeknownst to the staff I had made an abortive attempt to hang myself on the ward a week earlier.

When I read the Bill of Rights and learned about Habeas Corpus for the first time in a long time I had true hope. That hope was like divine light from inside. It swept aside my depression and anger. I was cheerful. Magnanimous. Happy. Content even. My mood totally reversed itself and I felt unstoppable. I knew real victory for me against my keepers was at hand. In fact I did win, in court a few months later and I got out of there.

The point is, real true hope can totally change your mental and emotional states around. Totally and completely and so fast it’s like magic. It can shatter months long depression and make you smile.

In my opinion Synergy Group’s decision to call themselves Truehope was pure marketing genius. If you are desperate and suddenly you have hope you may have a spontaneous remission of your suffering based entirely off the feeling of purpose and confidence you now possess.

For some maybe it’s almost subliminal but to me it’s a form of suggestion, to call their product ‘EMpower’ and their shtick ‘Truehope’. What is stopping GNC or Centrum from tweaking their formula and coming up with a competing  cure for that genetic mutation? Wouldn’t they make even more money? Would they call it TRanquil? or INspire? NUbalance? HealingZ?

A lot of folks have experimented on themselves like I did and found some emotional or thought related improvements from supplementation. I had enjoyed some great benefits from mere generic multivitamins when I was not taking care of myself all that well.

When I started taking care of myself and eating and living better the effects of supplements became much less. Unless you really do in fact have a proven and documented medical condition that prevents the natural uptake of vitamins and minerals then your body will naturally uptake and absorb what it needs from a well balanced diet.

There is no need to ‘buy’ into the ‘nutrient deficiency theory’ and just assume you happen to have a genetic defect. That’s what Truehope expects you will do. They expect you to connect the dots and conclude that your mental health issues are the result of a genetic mutation and that their product makes perfect sense to take to treat it.

In that they are just like Big Pharma who does not expect you will go on the internet and dig up research and studies which would show just how weak and unproven their chemical imbalance claims are. You are a customer. You are residual income to them and it makes good financial sense to get everyone into ‘maintaining’ themselves with whatever pills or supplements are the latest rage.

Find out first if you really have a genetic mutation that means you require four to twenty times the USDA recommended levels of vitamins and minerals. Just ask your GP for a blood lab. You will know in a few days or weeks. The Truehope reps won’t tell you to do that. You are not supposed to think critically about their claims.

Anything in life that is really worth having may be hard to attain. Lasting and stable mental health is one of those things that is worth having. If you have been seriously mentally ill for a long time it’s probably not going to be easy to attain.

I have been depression free for well over a decade. I have not had clinical or disabling anger, anxiety or manic issues in well over a decade. I cured myself of bipolar disorder, schizoaffective and ptsd.  Supplementation was about 2-5 %  of my overall personal mental health pyramid. It had an effect but it did not cure me of anything.

What cured me was meditation. Real meditation done over a long enough period of time changes your brain. The changes are so thorough and complete that I do not need to meditate every single day for hours on end like I did during my 20s when I was actively trying to attain emotional stability and mental quiet.

I have gone through long stretches where I did not take my supplements.  In the wake of 9-11 the company I worked for eventually shut down permanently. There was long period of time where I could not afford to supplement like I had been. I did not relapse because I stopped taking multivitamins.

I can go without meditation or supplements for long periods and not relapse because I was really and truly cured. I was changed. My brain changed. In psychiatric lingo my ‘chemicals’ became balanced again. When you are no longer dependent on pig pills or psych meds to remain stable you have a real cure. Otherwise you are just in treatment and not really recovered at all. If that treatment is supposed to be permanent then to claim you are healed, recovered or cured is the highest form of self deceit and dishonesty.

Personally, I am a closet scientist. I don’t have the math ability to be a really good lab worker but I must test and discover things for myself. I love to experiment and test my ideas. I always have.

I tell people that if they think they really are cured or recovered then they should find out if it’s really true. That means taking personal responsibility for your mental states and going through a period of time where you discontinue psych meds or supplements to find out for sure if you really are recovered underneath.

No psych med or herbal remedy or multivitamin or amino acid can heal your spirit. If you are spiritually lost and adrift no supplement is going to fix you. If you hate and loathe yourself no pill or capsule is going to fix that.

There is no supplement that can give you real self love and self respect. Those are two ingredients that I find are ‘deficient’ in a lot of people who suffer from mental illness and have labels like bipolar or borderline.

Self love, self respect and inner peace are a kind of magic too. If you love yourself truly you won’t self injure or want to terminate your own life. If you love life then you won’t suffer like those folks who think life is against them and they hate the world. If you have inner peace you have a shield against thought disorders, mania, compulsions and obsessive thinking.

You can achieve lasting mental health recovery by tending to the needs of your spirit and by embracing a lifestyle of simplicity, moderation and spirituality. You can help yourself by learning to relax, manage stress and let go of things you can’t control.

Some issues just go away with time. Maturity heals some kinds of problems. Getting older, growing up and the process of aging can find that you have picked up all sorts of cerebral ways to cope with impulses. Learning about your sensitivities and limits can allow you to avoid maxing out your stress levels. You learn to take it easy and to take care of yourself better and your bad days of major symptoms come less and less often as a result.

If you have a real genetic condition that prevents you from uptaking bioavailable minerals and vitamins you can get blood work to establish that fact and working with your doctor you can come up with a supplementation regimen that fits *you* and your needs and not just some one size fits all capsule that is apparently good enough for everyone and anyone who has issues.

Some EMpower defenders may find this post and say to me,

“EMpower has helped me so get off your crusade bitch you don’t know what you are talking about. This stuff saves lives. Who are you to talk smack about my beloved EMpower? Oh and Linus Pauling is God and you don’t have a Phd so stfu.”

I actually have had these kinds of comments before from people who took great personal offense that I dared call it Pig Pills or Truehype.  You know what boys and girls? I got the same kinds of hypervigilant and aggressive comments not to mention verbal abuse or ad homs from people defending psychiatric meds when I ripped into them too.

It didn’t stop me from warning folks, offering alternative solutions and telling people to think critically about psychiatry and psych meds. I don’t care if EMpower saved your dog. People wanted my opinion and based on what I’ve read about it, here it is. If you don’t  like what I have to say about your miracle vitamin get over it and move on.

There is something a little sketchy about the folks coming out with autobiographies on how Truehope saved their life. They are not just sharing their experiences and moving on. If you go to their sites they are selling Truehope products usually in what I assume can only be a mutual interests back scratching and profiteering franchise of some kind. They are getting paid to pimp Truehope.

I am not anti recovery and I don’t have an anti Truehope agenda. Truehope has got sleaze all over it though. From the weasel word salad that is their FAQ’s and research pages to their sweepingly huge claims in terms of how many mental issues they claim they cure. In the past miracle cures claiming to be effective in curing ‘everything’ have always panned out to be false, misleading or untrue. Always.

If you have been saved by EMpower, good for you. I hope it lasts. I hope you are not deceiving yourself and unnecessarily assuming you have a genetic mutation that requires you to take much greater amounts of vitamins and minerals than other people. If you really do have such a deficiency by all means keep on taking your capsules.

If you won’t get tested to see if that is really the case I hope you will one day have the self honesty and courage to find out if you are really cured of anything by trying a discontinuation period to see if you have really changed.

There will be those that defend EMPower and their final rebuttal will invariably be.

“If it helps people is that wrong? What do you have against that? If it works, what’s your problem? How can it be bad if people are benefiting from it? Who cares what it’s made of or how it’s made? Who cares who made it and why? If it works who are you to judge?

I don’t have a problem with that at all. Some of us just like to look under the proverbial hood and see what’s underneath. We wonder how the tricks are done and try to figure them out out of curiosity and a need to know how things work.

Look in the mirror one of these days and look at yourself in the eye and ask yourself if you are not riding hype, expectancy and the placebo effect. If you don’t want to find out or you don’t care how the magic works as long it works then fine. There are a lot of people like you that think that way about things in life like that.

This has been a really long post. I said it at the beginning and I will say it again. I have not personally tried EMpower so take my opinions with that in mind. I am not encouraging or discouraging anyone from trying EMpower. As I said earlier, from what I can tell, as supplements go it is a very complete one. If it was called TaiChiDragonFuel or something like that I would probably take it myself as my one-a-day multi.

I changed my mind about being done on this blog. There is still some stuff to write about.

Recently a visitor, Andy, asked me a question about smoking and meditation.

My answer to his question is the same answer I would give if someone asked me if they could smoke pot, drink coffee, do hallucinogens or take pysch meds while meditating and what effects would it have on meditation progress. I have been asked those questions before many times since I started vlogging and blogging about it.

I did make a short video about Meditation, spirituality and drug effects. but not everyone gets to my videos and upon consideration I could expound a bit more about the effects because I was one of those folks who tried meditating in my early twenties when I hooked on or experimented with everything from pot and mushrooms and painkillers to caffeine, speed, anxiety and anger.

None of this is theory but my own personal experiences using substances and chemicals and observing their effects on my internal states.

The question goes something like this.

Can I meditate or begin meditating under the influence of substances X, Y and Z?

The short answer is simply this. It won’t matter at the beginning, it will be a problem later on.

Short winded is something I am rarely accused of and I readily admit to using ten words when two would do. Here is the long answer and it contains meditation spoilers. :)

It won’t matter so much at the beginning, we’ve established that. This is why it will eventually matter quite a bit.

The primary goal of meditation is to create stillness. When you have stillness going on your mind is comfortable at total rest. In that space there is no rumination on things. Especially troubling things like obsessive thinking, dwelling on the past, destructive self critique and all the little voices that tear us down inside in one fashion or another.

Along the way to building stillness you are going to want to resolve in some way all the things that prevent you being still in the first place. To do that you can cultivate awareness of your internal world in two ways. Concentration practice and sensitivity practice.

As you work on one, you will gain greater facility with the other. The longer you concentrate on being aware the more sensitive you will become. The more sensitivity you can develop the greater the accuracy of your concentration will be.

Between the two you will really develop your intuition. Your intuition will inform you as to things inside you that are not quite right. Your intuition sort of processes all the subtle sensations and runs them through the memory chip for correlations and experiential knowledge. In a burst of gut knowledge you will know with fairly good accuracy what is bugging you.

The more practice you give yourself letting intuition guide you the better. Intuition is another faculty and as it’s reliability factor goes up it becomes a resource you can tap into voluntarily. You can just ask yourself what it wrong with you and get an instant and honest answer that might have taken long moments of cogitating and internal self debate to arrive at.

Whether you are meditating for enlightenment, trying to find inner stillness or just using meditation to relax those beginning steps are pretty much the same and the beginning never really ends and is much the same at more advanced levels as it was at the beginning.

You take time to align yourself and sit comfortably. You are mindful of your posture and skull and hips. You engage with your breathing and take a moment to let your mind just spin while you begin to cultivate the intention of your desire to sit still and let everything go.

I did that when I practiced meditation before karate class in my early teens. I do that before I start tai chi while standing. I still do this to this day twenty later when I sit and meditate. The point is the basics are the same no matter what and it’s a work in progress you can keep making refinements to.

When you are first beginning your ability to listen and interpret what is keeping you from being still inside will be fairly general. You will sense blackness or fog inside. You feel different flavors of pain and discomfort. You may space out and drift the minute you try to listen or concentrate.

You will be able to differentiate some things. Some will be really obvious like, gee, I am really angry or really sad right now. You may experience all kinds of mundane stuff like hunger pangs, internal gas moving around, an itch somewhere. Each one of those sensations from the emotional to the physical will be throwing stuff up and the combined noise of your internal world serve as one big mess of stuff inside agitating you all of which is preventing or limiting your stillness.

In terms of substances, everything you put inside yourself can have essentially three basic influences on you. It can add to sum of the noise inside you, it can diminish the noise inside you and it can have more or less no effect at all either way.

In the beginning you are cultivating that concentration and sensitivity. You are working with your breathing and being mindful and you are growing your meditation legs. The processes inherent in successful meditation take time to develop.

The next important factor is how much time you personally devote to cultivating those meditation legs. On that I can say it’s really like any other skill. Whether you are learning a musical instrument or playing tennis or meditating you get out of it what you put into it. If you become freakishly obsessive about meditation you can go thousand miles in one day.

If you are doing it hours a day, six or seven days a week, which is the best way to really change your brain wiring in a continual curve, you will be going thousands of miles a week and you will grow your concentration batteries and sensitivity network (and consequently your intuition as well) considerably faster than a person who meditates one hour a day every other other day.

What ends up happening is you begin to notice exactly how sensation or feelings effect the quality of your internal stillness. You perform an investigation into precisely the nature of your internal stuff that is very much like a science experiment. You begin to notice all that black churning stuff and random sensations isn’t all that random and the black stuff contains things that have definitive qualities we can sense accurately.

Body tension is one of the simplest things that plague us all from achieving stillness. We will find different qualities to that tension as well. You can find yourself holding yourself in a tense way internally. In time you also perceive that hologram-like effect in which the way you hold yourself physically also effects your thoughts and emotions.

Now you are working on three different tensions. Tense muscles and posture, tense emotions, tense thoughts and tense awareness. You resolve all that stuff or bring some measure of relaxation to each of those layers of being and gradually (or suddenly) your internal world is much much quieter.

For awhile you enjoy that quiet. You’ve made real progress. You can stop there. You can maintain a certain meditation hygiene and relax your mind, body and heart and gain great benefit from that.

If you don’t stop there, if you keep on pushing the envelope, you keep growing those meditation legs and make a conscious, deliberate attempt to increase both your concentration and your sensitivity then some thing else is going to happen.

You just grow an affinity for being still and a generalized discomfort with things that detract from that stillness. You will like being still basically and you won’t like the feeling of not being still. Your awareness will begin to nag you about your internal stuff that remains.

Without consciously trying you will be offered up internally, reasons for the sensations and feelings that are still going on inside you. The internal quiet you achieved seems not so quiet anymore. Your sensitivity has grown during the interim and what you sense now is that a new level of stillness could be attained, a deeper level, by resolving the latest batch of unwanted internal sensations.

You are emboldened by your past success so you know you can perceive and remedy the things that are churning you up inside so long as you have the motivation and you are willing to continue to trust your intuition which has also been growing in the interim.

Now we begin to pay ever more attention and mindfulness of our internal world. If we have a weekend in solitude we can spend every waking moment of the day being mindful without the influence of others nearby. We can listen all day acutely to our insides and monitor our internal stillness status. We pay particular attention to when we begin to move away from calm and still towards agitation and our intuition will pop out the answer when you ask,

“What is wrong? Why am I agitated? What is bugging me? How did I just lose my calm and grace?”

The answer will almost always be, something you did or exposed yourself to and put inside you or cultivated that destabilized you from a baseline of calm.

Maybe it was a song on the radio or a movie on cable that you saw. You got into the sensory experience of the movie or the song and by the end you notice you are not calm anymore.

Maybe you got off the phone with a relative or a friend and you noticed you were fine before the phone call, and not fine after it.

Maybe it’s dinner. Maybe you over indulged on spicy foods and you’ve got heartburn or indigestion and sensations are churning you inside somewhere, somehow in some way.

Maybe you slipped on ice or a wet floor and fell hard on butt or on your side or banged your head. You were calm before the fall, after the fall you have all these sensations of injury and insult reporting in. Maybe you are shaking. Making you are self recriminating for falling or getting a good angry going because someone should have cleaned up the water.

Then you sit and meditate you notice all these reactions going off inside you. Spicy food effects your emotions and thoughts. You pay careful attention to what you were thinking and feeling before, during and after consuming one substance or another be it food, music, drugs, vitamins, sex, TV, or a book.

Chocolate for example. A psychoactive substance if there ever was one. You feel and think differently after you eat a good sample of quality chocolate. It can have both a soporific and an innervating effect on me and makes me aware of my body as a sensual thing. ( read that as horny)

Gradually you grow this catalog of stuff that you know knocks you off your meditation pillow. When you really wed your perceptions to your intuition not only will you know what destabilized you but as I hinted earlier, you will also want not to be destabilized. You wonder what you can do to avoid it.

When get to that point you begin to fast. When I mean fast, I don’t just mean abstaining from food. I mean abstaining from everything that represents a possible threat to your internal stillness.

You fast from TV and the internet. Knowing full well they are distractions from being at one with your internal world and being mentally and emotionally still.

You fast from phone calls with relatives and hanging out with that rageholic friend who has so many triggers it’s like walking on eggshells to be around them. You don’t allow someone else’s emotional states to disrupt yours so fast from people too.

One day you will be sitting in your favorite chair and preparing to meditate and you are going to notice that you woke up, calm, centered and still. That’s how you went to bed. If you do that often enough this is what is going to happen.

You will wake up, get up, sit in your chair and take your morning sip of coffee (or tea) and the first puff off your morning cigarette (or cannabis joint) and boom. There it is. Your internal world goes from still and calm to disturbed.

It feels internally like someone threw a rock into your pond of quietude making a big splash and ripples which distort the mirror-like quality of the still water you had about a 30 seconds before the caffeine and nicotine reached your brain.

Then you are going to nod to yourself and say “Fuck”. You will too, because you will know, intuitively and intellectually what destabilized your stillness and you will say “Fuck” out loud because you are going to know immediately what to do about not experiencing that destabilizing again.

Then you will have a little war inside your self that goes something like this.

“No”

“Yes”

“No way”

“You have to”

“No, I don’t”

“Strictly speaking, no one can twist your arm other than yourself. How bad do you want stillness?”

“Fuck”

“I know, you don’t have to do it today though, if you don’t want”

“And how many days that I don’t do it are you going to remind me that I am only impeding my progress by procrastinating?”

“Every damn day that you do it, how’s that?”

“You can shut up now.”

“We will talk again tomorrow morning.”

You will screw around a little longer. You will stop adding sugar or cut yourself down from two cups to one cup. You will switch to the Lights brand of your favorite smoke.

Then you will take only a few sips of coffee and a couple of puffs before putting it out.

Then you will finally get sick of it because while you were putting off the inevitable your evil sensitivity was paying more acute attention to the feelings of the morning ritual of chemicals and you know for a fact that so much as one sip of coffee or one puff can introduce a distorting element inside you.

On that day you will, out of disgust with yourself, finally quit. You will hate every second of it while knowing it has to be done. You are making changes to your habits and behaviors and rituals and that sucks. It’s like losing a good friend.

Then you dissolve that sense of loss. You become a person who does not do those things. Then you find that your evening stillness carries through in the morning. You meditate in the morning and that carries you into the evening.

Eventually, a long ways down the road, you get to a point where that stability is so ingrained that you find you don’t have to meditate as much to keep it going. You can miss an evening or a morning meditation sit and you will be ok.

You will also find yourself, not wanting to miss meditation sessions anymore either. The net effect in the end is that you control for the effects of everything you willingly subject yourself to. When you control enough of those factors you will have much greater stillness and internal perception.

That means in time you must have a biochemistry that is free of substances which agitate, sedate, fog up or inhibit you in any way. Until you free yourself of all the toxic stuff you normally subject yourself to you will be a slave to felt sensation of the distortions of your consciousness. The real You, the >>I<< underneath it all, the source of all intention, the mindstream, the nature of your spirit will all be obscured.

Remember it’s not just foods and drugs. Your sensory experiences create chemical effects. If you watch something offensive, or get yourself riled up reading politics on the internet or you have a codependent relationship with someone who is abusive your resulting thoughts and emotions churn you up inside making stillness difficult if not impossible.

That is what I mean by fasting from everything. Only you know what sets you off and if you studiously avoid those things while trying to develop internal stillness you will progress well.

Otherwise, its like putting one foot on the gas and one foot on the brake especially when meditating and most especially when meditating under the influence of mind altering drugs and chemicals.

Your thoughts are feelings are not your own. They are drug induced. Alternately, your lack of certain thoughts and feelings that are your own can also be drug induced. In the end, if you are serious about hardcore meditation progress all avoidable psycho active, agitating or inhibiting substances must go. You must dissolve your attachment and need for them and if you do you will only benefit.

The ultimate long term benefit and some good news for after.

The ultimate long term payoff for consciously fasting from sensory disruptions is the discovery of your spirit and the source of your mind itself. A great stillness will grow gradually inside you. Within all that emptiness you find both form and formlessness. Something that generates will and intent and awareness.

From there you can do a spiritual investigation, using your awareness of your inner world as the medium, of the nature of the >>I<< itself. If you are very lucky you will discover the mindstream. That takes an extraordinary amount of stillness and relaxed concentration.

The good news is, after a long time of building this core of internal stillness it won’t be dislodged easily. There is scientific evidence that is not just a mental state but a physical development that is real.

If you wanted, if it was practical, you might be able to spend your life in perpetual retreat. Whether you live in ashram or a a hut by yourself deep in the woods you can shield yourself from the bulk of the stresses and distractions of life itself.

The ultimate question becomes, do you really want to? Do you really want to have a life? Do you want to partake of the same things everyone else does? Will it destabilize you?

If the answer is yes, then you are going to be open to hanging out with people, perhaps strangers with all their mysterious inner content. You will read the internets again and watch TV. You will listen to music again. If you really wanted, you could drink a cup of tea or have a beer or smoke a cigar with your friends on New Year’s Eve or move from the country to the city.

You will have a base of inner calm and that calm will persist through things like, being stuck in city traffic. Standing in line at a busy mall. Even going to a bar and having a few drinks and smokes with your coworkers.

Each of those things will add some kind of sensation or agitation or sedation or whatever. You can get irate at the news and it’s ok as long as you don’t make it a habit. If you go back to smoking a pack a day, twenty ounces of coffee, doing different drugs, listening to loud music all the time and gnashing your teeth at the news all day, you will chip away, a bit at a time, all that stillness you won for yourself.

But at this point, hopefully you have a self-harm status indicator in your mind at all times that tells you when you are approaching toxic levels of anything. At that point, you take a break and detox and go back and meditate. You be present and mindful and use the dissolving to smooth the ripples out in your inner pond of stability and bring yourself back to balance.

That way you can still partake of life and keep your calm. You can eat spicy foods and watch an emotional drama and eat some chocolate and wash it down with some alcoholic beverage and you are going to be ok the next day. You are not going to be manic or depressed or agitated so long as the ratio of stillness to stimulus is perpetually slanted in the direction of stillness.

If you can’t moderate yourself to a have a normal amount of stimulation in your life, you need to keep working on stillness and you need to dissolve your attachment to your need to be stimulated. Once you have that core sense of Self and a stable internal world you should try to interact with people and things and enjoy life.

Enjoy that bottle of champagne or that cigar or that joint but be mindful at all times how it effects your stillness meter and your stimulation meter. Keep the former always higher than the latter and you have a formula for being able to enjoy the fullness of life without the ascetic deprivations that were necessary in the intermediate and advanced stages in order to find yourself.

With diligence and continued practice you won’t lose your sense of self amidst a thousand distractions and you have a tool to wash off all the crap that starts to accumulate on your inner clarity. That’s what you do if you want to have a life like everyone else and don’t want to live in a walled fort, unplugged in the middle of nowhere. That’s a path of moderation and balance and it’s one path of the Tao.

]]> http://intentions.wordpress.com/2009/03/17/meditation-stillness-and-drug-effects/feed/ 6 Jane http://intentions.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/progress-baker-act-antipsychotics-and-site-details/ http://intentions.wordpress.com/2008/12/05/progress-baker-act-antipsychotics-and-site-details/#comments Fri, 05 Dec 2008 19:36:00 +0000 Jane http://intentions.wordpress.com/?p=454 ]]>

Hello folks,

As some of you know October was lost productivity month for me.  I did not get too much done on my book. However I am pleased to announce that I have over 60,000 words committed to print at this point. For the last three weeks I have worked on the manuscript every single day without fail. I am cleaning up two segments of it now and when that is done I will be sending it out to few people that have offered to review it.

My spouse, who is the math brained person in the relationship, has assured me that at approximately 400 words per page of a typical book that I have over 150 pages.  That means I am about half done.  It was also the more tedious portion to do.

I have an apology to make.

Writing, like any skill, is something you get better at the more you do it. Writing intensely in September, taking October off and writing all through November has given me a better eye for what looks good. I am very sorry for the complete suckage that is most of my stuff for the last year. I am sorry for all the suffering I have caused with my lackluster writing skills.

On the news front Mr. Dawdy at Furious Seasons has another strongly worded article roundly castigating the atypical class of neuroleptics. I am in complete agreement with him. I have said it before and I will say it again, drugging children and elderly is neglect and abuse. Antipsychotics/Neurolpetics have been proven to cause brain damage

My experience being forced to take Trilafon/Perphenazine was sheer misery. I have hinted about it here and there and certainly ranted about the evils of antipsychotics time and again. I finally wrote a detailed account of what happened and my experience on trilafon in my manuscript. It was the most difficult part to do so far.

Gianna at Beyond Meds sent me a link to an article about the overmedication of foster children. This was something I witnessed as well during my time in the system. Here is a post I made  awhile back covering some of that.

In other updates I have to take down some of my stuff here. When I started writing about my past it was a first pass at detailing events and details. As I have thought about them and made an effort to remember certain things more and more I find that there will be some variance to what gets put in the book and what I put here.  In order to avoid confusion some stuff will come down.

The new WordPress 2.7 is simply fantastic. The wordpress interface gives you some very useful statistics. For example it tells me what key words people are using when they find this site.

I am pleased to see that nearly every day some critically thinking heretic is asking google the question “Is Bipolar Real” or is “Bipolar bullshit?”

I don’t know what to think about the number of hits I get about the Baker Act. It might have something to do with the fact that I made a video called ‘Beating the Baker Act“  about Baker Act Abuse or “How to Beat the Baker Act.”

Arrgh!

Every single day someone in Florida is being sent to a Baker Act receiving facility against their will as a form of control. My video will teach you what you should expect and how to defeat the system. I give it to you free as a public service.  I don’t live in Florida. I do have some experience getting myself out of an institution legally and by the book.

People are also looking for information on how to Baker Act someone when they find this blog. All I have to say to them is that the Baker Act is only in Florida and that it is wrong.

^^-not my actual plate number

I am pleased to see people searching for alternative methods for managing their mental health problems like bipolar and schizophrenia. Over the last year or so I was asked by many people to summarize the process of real recovery from Bipolar. That is a very complex topic that I could lecture about for hours.  I have summarized the bulk of the important things with a video and post about 12 steps to bipolar recovery.

One of my subscribers recently sent me a link to an article demonstrating that meditation was superior to drugs for treating depression. As many of you know it was meditation that set me free from my mental health problems. When I was very young I was fascinated by the idea of developing mental power through discipline. I went on to share a significant portion of my experience using meditation in a post not too long ago.

I was going to comment on the recent story about suicide on webcam but I don’t really have time. I can say there is a good chance that the kid who did it may have known that broadcasting your suicide  had been done before.

The holidays are a great time to get manic and or kill yourself.  The end of a new year and the beginning of another is a time to spend in reflection of how awful your life is and how hopeless and meaningless your existence is. I wonder how many people will off themselves between now and 2009.

If you feel like killing yourself, please kill only yourself and don’t take other people with you.  It infuriates me when people do that. Take other people with them that is. I don’t believe that every life is worth saving or that suicide is necessarily a bad thing for some people.  I talked about why I feel that way in a video about suicide prevention.

Thanks to Marian for linking the playlist for the documentary ‘The doctor who hears voices”. It was a fabulous series of videos and I fully support the more humane approach towards dealing with mental illness that Rufus May advocates. Throw away your psychiatric drugs, they will never heal you of your problems.

Here is a sample of stuff from my mailbox.

More teens telling me that the drug cocktails their parents force on them are not working and only making them sick.

More foster kids telling me about the abuse that they suffered at the hands of their foster parents because their inept social workers put them in places where they would be retraumatized. One girl told me that her foster mother constantly threatened to put her back in the institutions. An experience I am all too familiar with.

More people, especially veterans of the middle east conflicts with ptsd are being Baker Acted in Florida.

In the last few months more people of all ages have written to tell me that my writings and videos have helped them. I can not tell you how humbled I am by that. I am happy if sharing my experiences had helped. I never expected this kind of response.

I don’t have all the answers to everything. I am not a guru or a doctor or a lawyer. I never intended on doing advocacy or activism. It sort of happened with a life of it’s own. Finally I want to sincerely thank everyone that has given me feedback and encouraged me to keep going.

Looking for Manic Depression coping strategies? Want to know a drug and therapy free method for managing your Bipolar Manic episodes? Do you want to know how to cure yourself of the symptoms of and prevent episodes of bipolar disorder mania? Then this video is for you.

I have tried six times to make this video and get it right. Finally, months after my first attempts, I present to you, a one hour and four minute lecture on how to permanently rid yourself of the Mania portion of Manic Depression. I hate calling it Bipolar. However, this video will teach you how to deal with the *bi-polarity mood swings* heading North. This was how I finally learned to manage and then beat my manic thoughts and delusions while keeping my creativity intact.

The video is basically two parts. In the first 30 minutes I talk about classic symptoms from the DSM. I talked a bit about how I experienced some of them and how I was able to determine what they were. I make no apologies for my take on hypomania. I have been *hypomanic* and have gone on *bipolar powered shopping and sex sprees* and you know what? I don’t think that was evidence of an incurable genetic brain disease. No way Jose. I don’t buy it. I do not believe in hypomania whatsoever.

I do believe that most of the other symptoms are signifying a certain kind of cognitive pattern that goes on largely unnoticed by the person experiencing it until it is pointed out to them by family, friends, therapists and the like. You don’t have to agree with me. You don’t have to like my opinions.

However if you are like me you are looking for alternative mental health treatment for your thought problems I suggest you tune out what you don’t like and keep watching, knowing the good stuff is coming.

If you like your meds and you think I am full of it than pass on this video and nothing will come of it. Frankly I found myself dying a little bit each day on psychiatric medications. It was intolerable.

Unfortunately as an adult unless I was heavily sedated under the effects of marijuana daily I lived in an unquiet mind that seethed with an endless, sourceless seeming, living rage. A mind that raced along like a drunken driver in the wrong lane on the highway. A mind that slammed me with violent imagery and self destructive impulses sometimes from morning until bed time.

I had no choice but to find a means to live with myself and control my thoughts in order to have a meaningful useful life and remain out of some kind of institutionalized living. It was that or drug addiction for life or suicide.

I used meds alright, just not doctor recommended pharma approved meds. In time I gradually learned self psychotherapy and a kind of DBT or CBT with mindfulness and journaling sans the actual journal. Gradually I grew a mental circuit of stillness. Meditation helped develop my prefrontal cortex. That is the area of the brain responsible for emotional and cognitive processing.

Now Kimberly of Bipolarsurvivorback has a video called Bipolar Medications: The Truth.

At around 4:45 and on she launches into every pseudoscientific cliche and fallacy in the book. It’s genetic. It’s a chemical imbalance. It’s like diabetes. But it gets downright intellectually dishonest for her to make the following claim.

In the description box on the right she states this at the bottom “Bipolar disorder, like schizophrenia, requires medications for the amelioration of symptoms, and there are no alternative options.”

This is one such alternative. The techniques that I teach you in this video are not entirely unique to me. I learned some of them from a meditation master and some of his better pupils. However I have been told before and reminded (recently) that these techniques are occasionally to be found in a rare and dying breed of therapists scattered around the world. Psychology degree wielding practicing humanistic psychotherapists occasionally impart this information to their clients. Rarer still is the outlaw psychiatrist heretic that will also teach this information.

Some feedback I have already received indicates that some people vehemently disagree with some of my opinions on bipolar at the beginning. Look, if you storm off in a huff and unsubscribe, obviously I have hit a nerve. However, for those of you who are absolutely serious about beating bipolar mania, I enjoin you to reserve judgment until you get to the second part of the video.

The second part of the video is the most important information I have ever released on my youtube channel about the mind and how it works. This is real psychology folks. This means something to me to share this hard won knowledge with you. This is my version of The Secret and my Theory of Everything (Bipolar).

Information is power and the truth will set you free. The second part of this video contains both. Understanding and practicing this information may empower you and change your life and your relationship to mental illness forever.

We have all heard of the chemical imbalance theory. This so-called theory has been around for years. I was told I had a chemical imbalance at age 14 inpatient in 1989. People will be told this if they are diagnosed today.

I questioned this theory when I was a teen through sheer disbelief. Later I wondered if it might be true. When I realized years had passed since I had had depression, anxiety, mania, voices and delusions despite the prognosis that said I would suffer all my life I knew there was something wrong with that chemical imbalance theory.

At the age of 32 my skepticism and indignation overcame my fears and I asked my GP if I could take the chemical imbalance tests. I wanted to see on paper if I still had a chemical imbalance. Asking her to order the bloodwork and testing for depression and bipolar entailed telling her my long secret psychiatric history. I had no fear of the results. I knew I was cured of Bipolar. I just wanted proof. I wanted to be undiagnosed.

My wonderful doctor returned my call and she informed me there were no lab tests for depression or bipolar. I was flabbergasted and righteously upset. How the hell did the pdocs and my treatment team determine I had had imbalanced chemicals all those years ago?

Answer, they did not know. They flat out lied to me. There was no test to take which proved any balance of any chemicals. I first found out about these lies from the fantastic youtube channel Psychetruth. These two videos, Chemical Imbalance and The Truth about antidepressants and chemical imbalances are excellent primers.

This fact was already well known by psychiatrists. Loren Mosher in his famous resignation letter to the American Psychiatric Association accused his fellow psychiatrists of willingly propagating the chemical imbalance lies despite the fact that it was utterly unproven.

Today I breezed by my friend Gianna’s blog and discovered she had posted an article originally from Healthy Skeptic debunking the chemical imbalance myth.

Healthy Skeptic is run by a guy named Chris Kresser and he has indeed done his homework. This excellent article is a must read for anyone that has ever suffered from depression or depressive illnesses.

Thanks Chris for this information and for your hard work in collating and exposing the realfact versus the pharmaganda.

Yesterday I released a video talking about and demonstrating some internal martial arts and a variety of different chi gung moves taken from different sets. In my writing and on my videos I have talked about how tai chi and chi gung helped me rebuild not only my physical health but my mental health as well. This was the work I did to heal.

During my healing journey I studied with a variety of teachers and practiced a variety of methods. When I first started this blog I posted about my martial arts experience and the connection between my post traumatic stress induced obsessions. You can read my martial arts *resume* here.

For the rest of this post I will use the word nei jia to substitute typing out tai chi, chi gung, etc etc.

When I say I went on a *healing journey* it was really a journey in the fullest sense of the word. Everyone starts off as a newb in this business. It takes to time to develop a strategy to self train. Every teacher seems to be selling something different by degrees both minor and major. Not every teacher knows what they are doing. Some teachers know really useful stuff and it takes awhile to both find those teachers and to come to the realization of what the real stuff really is.

In my experience I have met more than one tai chi teacher whose tai chi instruction could actually hurt you. Hurt you as in exacerbate old issues and problems rather than repair them. They simply did not know better.

I’ve met teachers that basically only know how to teach a form or forms. They know the names of every move and they teach it by rote but there is nothing there. It’s been said by some teachers that the design and ingenuity of some of these disciplines is such that even with little or no in depth knowledge of the material one could attain some level of benefit, physically and mentally simply by practicing the forms as directed over and over.

On the other hand if you are lucky enough to find an instructor that is teaching these detailed, usually supposedly *secret* trainings or methods than your options for inner growth and achievement increase significantly.

My first two tai chi teachers had absolutely no idea what they were doing. In the grand scheme of things they taught me some forms but that’s it. They were form technicians and had no other functioning level of knowledge pertaining to the physical, mental or spiritual aspects of tai chi to impart. They were nice people which you find in tai chi circles a lot. They just had no idea about how deep the study went and they had been training in tai chi specifically for 20 years.

During my first year of tai chi training, within literally days of learning some of the *real stuff* from the real deal instructors I could do more with my tai chi and applications than my then-current teachers. Upon demonstrating these advanced methods to those teachers and proving their effectiveness I realized that the time to part ways with them had come. They were learning from me at that point. I did not want to waste my time in fealty to teachers that did not have the goods.

Training with real masters is expensive when you work blue collar. Unskilled manual labor has long hours and low wages. In the late 1990s I could usually keep a roof over my head and stay well fed but to attend a seminar or retreat took months of saving every dollar and cent. I lived in thrift and relative poverty because whatever money I had that was not spend in living expenses or drug habits was spent on my *habit* of wanting to train with quality teachers.

For those viewers and subscribers to my vlog and blog that wondered about the appearance of the material that I espouse so enthusiastically this video is a talk covering some of my physical problems and the solutions to them. I demonstrate small portions of the different things that I tried.

In so many ways this material saved my life. It helped me physically to repair from ingrained tension and unhealed injuries. It balanced my *chemicals* and helped to stabilize my moods thereby warding off depression. It helped me slow down my thoughts. The so called racing thoughts and flights of ideas of mania or manic episodes were largely mitigated through these practices. With a calmer mind, body and heart, nei jia practices enabled me to get really deep into sitting meditation practices. It was in sitting meditation practices that I usually tended to process things like emotionally traumatic memories.

I have never tried to market myself as anything other than a passionate student. The breadth and depth of the material that I was exposed during the first four years of my healing and internal martial arts studies was profound enough for several lifetimes of study. If I had two or three hundred years then perhaps I might master some of the things I learned but in this case I will be learning and refining until the day I die.

At first all I wanted to do was learn the martial stuff. I was fixated on it, no obsessed fanatically with it. But as time wore on I realized that what I needed to heal was to focus on healing. The thought process went something like this.

I want to get powerful and competent at applications and self defense. It turns out if I really and truly was serious about that than I was better off study basic power training exercises as opposed to learning a multitude of mediocre techniques. So it was off to do basic power training until further notice. In the process of doing the power generation basics like circle walking and standing chi gung I came to know more about how much healing my body really needed to do. I was limited to how much *power* I could actually and meaningfully extract from these methods so long as my body remained disconnected and messed up.

That led to focusing more and more on healing techniques. Ostensibly I was now healing myself in order to do power training in order to do real internal martial applications. The longer I worked at healing my body the more intimate I became with my inner world which did translate into the meditation aspects. So now I was finding myself involved more and more with meditation until I found the triggers and glitches that kept me so obsessed with the martial side of things.

On that day I lost my insatiable implacable need to train in martial arts and was able to give myself over to meditation. Then my personality really started to change and I became a person with other interests and capabilities then just martial arts and self defense. Although I lost that obsessive fear driven need to train in martial arts all the time I did not lose my love of them or my appreciation for their healing and defensive capabilities so I continue to practice them.

At the end of the day I can make a strong case that Chinese medicine, chi gung and martial arts had the greatest effects on my mind and body hands down compared to any other treatment or combination of therapies. Chi gung and Nei gung were stronger medicine than the ineffective drugs, herbs, crystals, essences or diets that I had subjected myself in order to heal my spirit.

I passionately endorse the practice of these methods. The real deal teaching will transform your inner world, heal your body and mind and grant capabilities you did not have before. I have passed the first ten year mile marker as an internal arts practitioner. I can point to my more knowledgeable peers and elders in various systems that I have learned from in the past. However due to the many levels of personal success with these practices I am confident I can offer some level of useful training to prospective students and inquiring minds.

To give an honest self assessment my meditation skill set is ahead of my healing skill set which is currently ahead of my martial skill set primarily due to the fact that I hardly ever train rigourously with other people these days since I am wrapped in my book and doing research.

When the book is out and I have had some time to get back in shape I will in all likelihood begin teaching publicly. What I teach then will be entirely dependent on how confident and comfortable I am with whatever I am working on at the time. I can’t practice every method I know simultaneously so some of my techniques will always be more polished than others.

In my July-August update video I told folks I would be making some space for myself to concentrate on my book this month and that by the end of August I will most likely be enabling the friend lock feature on my youtube channel as well as closing down my comments section so I do not feel compelled to moderate and answer everyone. No offense folks. I love your stories. I learn so much from people that choose to comment here. The time has come however to really work on my project and get it done. To that end I can’t be getting so much feedback all the time from so many sources. At least for a little while.

Next item. I have taken the time to create several talks about a variety of meditation frequently asked questions that I get.

Not too long ago I made an introductory video to introduce an article I posted about the phenomena of the Dark Night of the Soul.

Soon after I was stalled for a muse to talk about the spiritual experience I had back in 2000 that stabilized me and gave me a reason to live. So I made a video about it instead, resolving the question of how to tell if you have been possessed demonically, spiritually or inhabited by aliens and what to do about it.

This week, pressed with a sense of urgency I have been releasing talk after talk about meditation covering FAQs and much more.

Can you meditate on drugs? Can you meditate on entheogens, street drugs, psych meds etc?

Meditation, spirituality and drugs.

There is quite a few beginning meditation videos out there on the Tubes and I was not intending on making one myself. After a recent spate of heartfelt requests that I give a talk about it I gave in and made a Meditation for Beginners video. God help you now.

A few weeks ago I released a long fuzzy video about Meditation, ptsd and trauma triggers and discuss how you should use meditation to release yourself from the prison of psycho emotional triggers that limit your life experience and options.

Today I may have released my most contentious meditation video yet. You will probably agree totally with me or you will disagree vehemently with me. Maybe both here and there. That is ok with me. I am not going to pretend to have all the answers. I am not a scholar or historian or disciple of Buddhism, Taoism or Zen.

Repeatedly I get asked:

What is the best meditation?

What meditation do you, Jane, recommend?

Do I need a meditation teacher? Why?

Do I need a meditation community? Why?

This video answers all that.

Meditation: best kinds, finding teachers, origins of

There is religious and *intellectual* paths and then there is just sitting. My meditation heroes, Da Mo, Dogen and Siddhartha all got some basic training in meditation and then they went and did the hard work of doing it and seeing where it would go. They practiced for long periods by themselves, in isolation without a communal reinforcement or constant guidance from an attentive teacher.

Da Mo Dogen Siddhartha

I chose not to be a Buddhist or aspire to Boddhisattvahood. I chose not to be a Tao Shr or Lao Shr or whatever. I chose not to go to a TM foundation, a Tibetan Buddhist Monastery or a yoga ashram in India or or a Soto zendo in Japan.

Instead I did a kind of *meta analysis* of meditation. I have stacks of books about the subject and have had perhaps over a dozen meditation teachers over the years.

I realized I did not need to work on Koans or learn the Lotus Sutra or hear satsang in a sangha in order to meditate and gain benefit from it.

Instead I realized that you could separate out all the *ism* portions of religion and mysticism and just focused on certain practices like being present, dissolving, breathing, sitting, standing and moving and gain incredible benefit from it. You practice ontology. Forget the word ontology or existential and just work on the important stuff. Breath, relax, inhale, exhale, dissolve the content of your mind and body and ask yourself, really ask yourself. “Who am I?, What do I want? Who is it that asks? Where am I? Why am I? What is it that opens and closes it’s eyes? Who is that sleeps and eats and defecates? Where is the Inquirer that is inquiring?”

Keep breathing and dissolving. The end result may just be a spiritual accident which turns out to be life changing.

Do not worry about enlightenment, kensho, *getting it* or chasing sensations. Do not let your search for validation for your experience cheapen it or distract you from getting on with more work as needed.

When I had my experience I kept it to myself quite frankly. I did not email everyone I knew and babble enthusiastically about my experience searching for validation from others. “Did I do it? Is it real? Is it can be enlightenment time? Is this kensho? What happened? Can you explain it? Am I dialed in now?

I kept my mouth shut about it for years.

Only upon reflection did I realize the nature of what happened to me. It was a major internal adjustment and realization but no more or less than that. It was a powerful series of enlightenments, insights, realizations and vibrations culminating a long series of them that had occurred during the previous years as a result of my honest and earnest practice.

I did not ask for an explanation or validation then and I do not now. There is no need to pigeon hole my personal experience into some pseudo meditation experience hierarchy. Besides, how many people do you know that tried to detect and exorcise a possessing spirit using meditation and chi gung? I was in uncharted waters and I mapped them myself on my own terms out of necessity and desperation.

Enlightenment and spiritual powers are for those that really want them. I was not looking for either when I had my spiritual experience. I just wanted to be sane. Not perfect or a model saint. Just sane and reasonably normal.

They say meditation takes a normal person and elevates him or her to a superior person. I don’t know anything about that. All I know is that I was an inferior person and meditation elevated me to a level of normalcy. That is what I know about, that is what I can teach.

As a result when people ask me what the best path is, who the best teacher is, do they need a teacher or not. My answer comes from a point of view of what do you want from meditation?

I have other news for you. Not all my minor realizations, insights, higher vibrational states or enlightenments happened when I was sitting. Sometimes they happened when I was fully engaged and present at work by my machine in a factory trying to support myself and my internal martial arts habit.

Sometimes they happened to me when I was doing chi gung sets or tai chi. Sometimes they happened while merely walking through the park and staring into the horizon.

Not for a moment would I sell myself as a guru or enlightened master. I am not a saint or a martyr for morality. I like to cuss and eat fish and sometimes I leave snarky comments on a blog or a video. I would not be entirely opposed to having a beer, a cigarette or something even stronger at a birthday party of a close adult friend or on New Year’s Eve or something. I take occasional pain meds, opiates and even the occasional cannabinoid for old back injuries from time to time.

If I said I was Enlightened I could not have the freedom to let my temper flare or be imperfect. I would have to roleplay irl™ someone that is holier and better than thou. I simply won’t pretend to a throne, a title or a role that I do not want.

That means you are going to have to accept that normal imperfect people who meditate largely on their own can have meaningful meditation experiences and make lasting changes in their own personality or consciousness. If you think meditation teachers should all be perfect and above the mundane, you will want to pass on any instructions I might have to give.  I work with the mundane, the banal, the profane and normality. In short I work with reality, here and now,  down to earth. I work with getting one’s self back to balance while still engaging in a normal life complete with stresses and toxins.

If I wanted to be to be pristine and undisturbed and unshakably stable at all times I would not interact with the world! I would be in retreat always. The true test of enlightenment, of meditation stability is to come from great sickness and confusion and stay reasonably healthy, sane and relatively balanced in a normal ordinary life. It is easy to seem balanced and perfect all the time when you are safe from all stresses and distractions in the peace of your isolated retreat. It is much harder to keep that level of grace and lead a normal life of indulgence and participation.

If you are looking for a miracle promiser or someone who will state the obvious make pronouncements or utter trite cliches profound wisdom that delights and confounds you there are plenty of people who shoulder that mantle you can learn from.

In the meantime I hope these videos will tie you folks over for a bit.

Here too is a list of some of my other older meditation vids. Quality does vary from vid to vid but hopefully you are more interested in the message than technical merits.

Meditation and mental fog

Meditation and dissolving

Meditation: real versus false

and an older albeit shorter version of working with triggers.

Meditation and triggers

The longer one is better and far more detailed with actual instructions.

It’s great to have my new digital camera instead of the limits of web cam/microphone set up. The quality of video, frame rates, voice and color should be less variable more standard as I usher in a new era of low budget youtube videos.

That is all for now.

Just a quick note for all those neurological and brain science researchers into meditation and manic depression.

I have a standing offer to volunteer for mri or pet imaging of my brain.

Why would you want to image my brain?

As a patient with untreated manic depression and schizophrenia my brain should be a wasteland. Studies apparently show that

Bipolar brains shrink

schizophrenic brains shrink

Bipolar brains have an unique chemical signature

Bipolars apparently have a genetic biomarker

schizophrenics apparently have a genetic biomarker

Family genetics

In 1991 my mother admitted to me during my second inpatient stay for suicide that she had suffered depression and suicidal ideation all her life.

In 1999, ten years after my dual diagnosis of manic depression and schizo affective my sister went inpatient on the opposite side of the country for a suicide attempt. She was diagnosed with Bipolar.

As we move through the year 2008 I look back on the fact that I have been depression, mania, self injury , voices and delusion free for over ten years.

How is this possible you might ask?

If you are familiar with my blog content and videos on youtube then you know how.

I secluded myself from other people with mental health issues and practiced meditation full time for years.

After the first year of that lifestyle I achieved a milestone marker of the first year without cyclical suicidal depression. Now over ten years have passed and I remain symptom free.

Some folks would not think breathing exercises and navel gazing could have that effect but that is because they are not up to date on the latest in meditation and brain imaging research.

1. Meditation is a way of tapping into a process of manipulating brain activity

2. Meditating does more than just feel good and calm you down, it makes you perform better — and alters the structure of your brain, researchers have found.

3. Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence for something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained for centuries: Mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness.

4. “Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being,” says Sara Lazar, leader of the study and a psychologist at Harvard Medical School

5. New imaging technology makes it possible for scientists to document the brain activity of Buddhist monks. Dalai Lama visits MIT

6. In recent years, a group of neuroscientists are exploring the hypothesis that meditation can actually change the way the brain works.

7. scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison used new scanning techniques to examine brain activity in a group of Buddhists.Their tests revealed activity in the left prefrontal lobes of experienced Buddhist practitioners.This area is linked to positive emotions, self-control and temperament.Their tests showed this area of the Buddhists’ brains are constantly lit up and not just when they are meditating.

8. Medical effects of meditation.

So I make the following predictions. I must have these bipolar/schizoid biomarkers. I must have this unique bipolar brain signature. At 33 years old having had my first suicidal ideation nearly 25 years ago there must be some observable level of brain volume decrease.

Unless I have reversed that brain volume decrease. According to the meditation studies meditation builds the brain up increasing brain volume and density.

So we can make a few generalized conclusions.

Either meditation cured me of mental illness and there is no evidence in my brain whatsoever of the alleged brain destroying powers of bipolar and schizophrenia.

Or I still have these disorders and they are completely held in stasis by meditation.

Now either of those conclusions are medically and scientifically significant.

Meditation won’t put a dime in Big Pharma’s bank account but it is definitely important information to the ongoing study of psychology and perhaps psychiatry as well.

I make this offer. I am willing to submit to brain imaging while meditating and not meditating.

After 20 years of meditation experience I can make my brain light up the same way Tibetan and Buddhist Monks do I guarantee it.

I would also like to make a few other predictions or speculations about these brain images and biomarkers.

The first is this.

Biomarkers occur as a result of prolonged mental illness symptoms.

It is a correlation not a cause.

Biomarkers would eventually disappear if the symptoms went into remission long enough.

This is similar to the *chemical imbalance* theory.

Genetic chemical imbalances do not cause mental illness. The chemical imbalance is an effect of prolonged suffering of symptoms. Such chemical imbalances would restore themselves if the symptoms went into remission long enough.

Brain cell death and brain volume decreases associated with Bipolars and Schizoids are a result of the treatments for the illness, not the illness itself.

For Bipolars and Schizo that self medicate, the years of alcohol and drug abuse cause brain volume decreases.

For Bipolars and Schizoids that use polypharmacy the probable cause of this brain volume decrease is their meds more specifically neuroleptics.

That is not to say mental illness has no appreciable effect on brain volume.

There is the saying, if you don’t use it you lose it. Certainly if you fail to control or try to control your mental health symptoms then the natural brain functions that would instill stability become stunted and atrophy.

However in learning to manage mental illness symptoms without drugs I am guessing those areas of my brain are in reality much more developed than you might expect. Perhaps more developed than in those who never suffered from mental illness because it is an area of the brain I had to work at constantly to achieve stability and wellness.

My conclusions.

Biomarkers and chemical imbalances are the snapshot of ongoing mental illness. They are an effect of the illness, not a cause or a predictor. These imbalances and markers would disappear with remission of symptoms.

Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia do have a cure. Meditation is that cure. I think the MRI and PET scans will prove this unambiguously.

If you weigh the risk-reward ratio for taking five years out of your life in order to meditate until your emotional and cognitive controls are established. You compare that to a life spent with unmitigated mental health issues or a life spent on polypharmacy dependency than you will quickly realize that interrupting your career and lifestyle in order to cure your mental health problems permanently is more advantageous than a life spent keeping symptoms at bay with drugs while developing diabetes, obesity, tardives dyskinesia, nervous system ataxia, thyroid imbalances, kidney failure and psych med addiction.

Who is willing to take five years out of their life to meditate until they have inner peace?

Only the most eccentric, the most desperate and the most intelligent of people.

You have to have a certain level of foresight to see the benefits. Most people are too hung up trying to consume and move up Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs to slow down and do what it takes to make lasting changes in themselves.

They would rather pop a pill and keep on surfing the web than sit down by a river or in the silence of their bedroom and sit quietly until they have mastered their mental landscape. It is too much work to heal yourself. That and all the bullshit pharmaganda would have people believe that it is not possible and they don’t have anything to take responsibility for. (except getting that scrip filled right away!)

Big Pharma takes advantage of that and profits. People tell themselves it is worth it as long as the pills keep their credit lines active and roof over their head.

Another predication I make is that the mental illness reversing powers of meditation work better the younger you are when you start. The more severe the symptoms, the sooner you need to check out of life and meditate.

People in their 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond will have decades of inertia to overcome if they have been suffering all that time. There is a sad irony to that. Young people generally don’t take that kind of time off. They are too busy being beautiful and trying to be successful. It was mostly older folks I met in meditation circles.

People in their teens, 20s and 30s that take this work seriously can make huge leaps in mental health sanitation if they take stick with it.

The longer you go without meditation the harder it will be do reverse your mental illness with it.

Not to say it is impossible, just much more difficult. I started serious meditation at the age of 21 a year after my last suicide attempt. That may have made a major difference in my recovery.

In the meantime, I would like to see future imaging studies of the brain to include whether or not the subjects being imaged have been on meds, what meds those are and how long they have been on them

I want to see controls in these studies such as scans of brains of people with bipolar and schizophrenia that are not on meds at all and compare them to scans of people on meds. I want clarifications and more details about these brain shrinkage studies.

So to further the cause of science and psychology I offer myself for brain imaging studies as a meditator who has cured themselves of manic depression and schizophrenia. I am also willing to take the bipolar and schizophrenic biomarker tests at anytime.

Remember, if I have the biomarkers, than my symptom remission is scientifically valuable information

If I do not have these biomarkers while my sister continues to receive treatment for bipolar and my mother continues to go without it than this too is scientifically significant.

Gene expression is an interesting thing. Stress, hormones, sickness and health all turn genes off or on. My guess is that gene expression for mental illness is not set in stone but is merely a snapshot of the current situation, not a reason or a predictor but an effect.

My contact information is on my Home page

Links to my sources used for the video Meditation, Mental Health and the Brain

1. Meditation is a way of tapping into a process of manipulating brain activity

2. Meditating does more than just feel good and calm you down, it makes you perform better — and alters the structure of your brain, researchers have found.

3. Brain research is beginning to produce concrete evidence for something that Buddhist practitioners of meditation have maintained for centuries: Mental discipline and meditative practice can change the workings of the brain and allow people to achieve different levels of awareness.

4. “Our data suggest that meditation practice can promote cortical plasticity in adults in areas important for cognitive and emotional processing and well-being,” says Sara Lazar, leader of the study and a psychologist at Harvard Medical School

5. New imaging technology makes it possible for scientists to document the brain activity of Buddhist monks. Dalai Lama visits MIT

6. In recent years, a group of neuroscientists are exploring the hypothesis that meditation can actually change the way the brain works.

7. scientists at the University of Wisconsin at Madison used new scanning techniques to examine brain activity in a group of Buddhists.Their tests revealed activity in the left prefrontal lobes of experienced Buddhist practitioners.This area is linked to positive emotions, self-control and temperament.Their tests showed this area of the Buddhists’ brains are constantly lit up and not just when they are meditating.

8. Medical effects of meditation.

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.