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/2008/06/13/baker-act-abuse-and-involuntary-commitment/ http://intentions.wordpress.com/2008/06/13/baker-act-abuse-and-involuntary-commitment/#comments Fri, 13 Jun 2008 08:11:19 +0000 Jane http://intentions.wordpress.com/?p=147 ]]>

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In all three cases I got myself released.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Last week I discovered an online book called ‘Stripping the Gurus’ Sex, violence, abuse and enlightenment by Geoffrey D. Falk.

Mr Falk lifts the veil on corrupt spiritual teachers and organizations with an eye opening look the dark side of supposedly enlightened leaders. He takes the expected shots at the Roman Catholic church and the Scientologists but he also deconstructs some interesting names within the navel gazing and mantra slinging communities. Names like Maharishi, Dass, Rajneesh and Trungpa.

Other tantalizing chapters include:

Zen and the art of sex and violence

To a nunnery

Cockroach yoga

Deconstructing Ken Wilber

I have not read the book in it’s entirety but I am working on it. It is very interesting and it showcases some of the abuses that people may be setting themselves up for when giving themselves and their money over to a specific guru or path.

These are some prime examples of how an apparently wise and spiritually advanced teacher can misrepresent their own level of development. They preach one thing, yet do another. Vice and frailty is part of being human but some of these egomaniacs are deeply flawed individuals projecting themselves as holier than thou whilst sinning against the people they are supposedly trying to reach.

These exposures and critique pieces are good reminders of what happens when you over take on the mantel of teacher or leader. These serve as warnings as well.

Reading articles and pieces that denounce and expose the ideas or lifestyles of the spiritual teachers has had an effect on my own ideas and possible plans for teaching.

I can choose now, to some degree, how I want to present my own teachings. I don’t want to be drop kicked off a pedestal by disillusioned former students so I will wage my own campaign of making sure you have not been led to believe I have some kind of vaunted level of enlightenment or special powers. I don’t want to be a chapter in Mr Ward’s second edition printing, nor do I want to find myself being mocked at James Randi Educational Foundation for my untestable or unprovable claims to sidhis or powers.

I would not want to be considered one of the Unenlightened Pseudomasters that con and cheat genuine well meaning spiritual seekers.

Geoffrey’s comment at the bottom of the index page sums the attitude up nicely. Pay attention Micheal B.

“Being *God,* after all, means never having to say you’re sorry.”

Why some people go off meds. A personal experience of ‘noncompliance’. With all the articles and comments about taking responsibility for oneself and one’s meds as a mental health patient I thought I would share some experiences concerning the issue.

As I followed links over a Furious Seasons I find this article.

Getting ‘Off Meds’ Has Consequences

Here I cut and paste some testimonials from the article.

Coughlin said the last time he stopped, in the 1990s, he became extremely obnoxious and agitated, and ended up in a mental hospital.
Now he’s on three mood stabilizers that zap his energy and cause weight gain, but make him feel “more solid, more relaxed, more satisfied in life.

Coughlin, a board member of the Illinois chapter of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, said he finally accepts that to function, he’ll need to be on drugs for life.

Well, there are some people, such as myself, for whom experiencing these same side effects, tremor, weight gain, zapped energy, are too high a price to pay. To us it is a debilitating unnecessary stigmata. It is penance for being mentally ill. It is completely intolerable and unacceptable.

.
When I went on meds I was 14 years old. I had no choice at all. I was inpatient, suicidal and psychotic. Every day I did not take meds willingly, I would be restrained and injected with them. It was unbelievable to me that these people could threaten to assault and violate me after all the violation and abuse I had suffered that had led to the present inpatient situation. This completely shattered all trust and faith I had that I could be helped in this place.

I was put on perphenazine and lithium carbonate. In horror I watched my own body betray me. Previously I had been extremely energetic, highly coordinated and very slim. I lost command over my voice as it became slurred and strenuous, I was drooling from the mouth. I lost my grace acquiring the tremoring hand of Parkinson’s as well as the shuffling gait the trademark ‘thorazine shuffle‘.

Then came the lithium and the perpetual dry mouth. Then I started gaining and gaining weight in a constant upward curve. I could taste the psyche meds in my mouth, smell them in my sweat. Previously I had been graced with an exceptionally high reading speed and retention. Now I found I could not read or concentrate on anything for long. Constant memory gapping throughout the day stitched through with a perpetual mental fog The emotional blunting left me without real passion for much of anything while deep inside the real me was screaming nonstop.

They told me I had to take these drugs for the rest of my life and I knew despair. I had come here for help for my depression and was now more depressed and more suicidal than ever before and totally unable to communicate this to anyone. No one was asking or listening. My thoughts and feelings were totally irrelevant. I was told I could not be therapied until I had adjusted to the meds ‘for some time’ since basically they were talking to the disease. No one could explain how this was therapy or how this would restore me to the living. Just the usual “You have a chemical imbalance that needs to be addressed by your lack of lithium”. Explain to me how lithium is going to cure me of my hatred of you? Someone? Anyone?

After spending three months inpatient I was transferred to a juvenile psychiatric group home to learn to live with and accept my diagnoses and the medications. For months I lived in this awful place. Various side effect came and visited me the longer I was on these drugs. I started sleepwalking, experienced UTIs and continued to get heavier and heavier while existing in mental, emotional and physical vegetative state.

After some time there at the on site school, it was arranged for me to take half a day classes at the local high school. The last straw was when one of the kids called me fat. That was it. Before the psych meds I had always been relatively thin primarily as a result of hyper vigilance and PTSD I was so nervous and tense all the time I consumed energy just sitting still. Well, not any longer. I was 15 years old and now had stretch marks where previously I was toned. I no longer had any sexual response. I was a teen. Teens are supposed to have sexual response. I became to so enraged and suicidal at the same time that it was enough to punch through the chemical straitjacket on my feelings. In Bipolar lingo, a mixed episode.

In fit of helpless rage and depression I tried to commit suicide several times in my room that night;. Everything had to be done perfectly with the timed bed checks. As I was experimenting with setting up a hanging it occurred to me that I was about to check out because of this place, the meds, the environment, the hopelessness and helplessness of it all. I said no way. If I am going to check out it will be on my terms so I aborted. The next day, instead of going to school, I fled the facility.

I was eventually recaptured and returned. Upon arrival they put me in isolation. For days I went on a hunger strike and tried to will myself to die. During this time I was detoxing off high doses of lithium and the antipsychotic. My environment was either the Quiet Room or my own room. On the floor or on my state issue bed I lay absolutely still with my eyes closed concentrating on slowing down my breathing and heart rate. That is all I did hour after hour.

On the third day the nurse came and assessed me. I was losing weight. She asked me what I was trying to do. I looked her in the eye with a smile and said “I am leaving”. She went on to tell me that if I continued this, they would re-hospitalize me. This time at the State hospital for forced nourishment. Other ‘treatment options’ would be reviewed since nothing was working. I knew I did not want that indignity brought upon me. So I surfaced from the depths of where I had withdrawn and carried on as though nothing happened.

During my detox I suffered absolutely no negative side effects whatsoever. None. In fact as the hours slipped by I felt only better and better. My mind came back on line. I felt clean and pure and alive again. I could no longer smell the lithium through my skin or taste the anti psychotic in my mouth. I was me again.
Energy surged back. It was like being released from psychic prison as my thoughts soared and gained the familiar speed back. I was free of that slow inescapable death of personality.

When I looked in the mirror I no longer recognized myself. The old me had been slipping away, day by day as the powerful chemicals eroded my personality and poisoned my soul. I could not stand to spend one more second of one more minute of one more hour on those drugs. I had had enough. No more. I wanted my body back. I wanted my intelligence back. I wanted my feelings back. I would rather suffer or die than be on psychiatric medications ever again.

As a result of my experiences I was unwilling to try medication roulette by experimenting with other psych meds. I had been poisoned. As the side effects of the meds slipped away, all my internal turmoil was revealed. There had been no therapeutic value to my time on meds at all. The mania and depression was still there. The Voices were back. The flashbacks were back. All my problems remained. They had never left me. I had left them.

When my body chemistry was normal again, I was faced with my internal world again as well as a heightened awareness of my circumstances living in close quarters with other mentally ill residents. I had lost six months of my life to those drugs. Six months that I could never get back, completely wasted. I now had to recover from being on psych meds. Starting with losing the 80 plus pounds I gained.

As the lights came on and the fog cleared I was able to pay attention and think clearly. My attention was drawn to the Patient’s Bill of Rights which stated that patients over the age of 15 had the legal right of consent, to refuse consent, to medical treatment. As long as the patient is not a demonstrable threat to self or others than can not be forcibly medicated and may refuse medications or other treatment.

In order to prove I was no longer symptomatic I borrowed a spare copy of the DSM from my Pdoc and studied the symptoms of bipolar. I committed the symptoms to memory and began a program of mind over body self discipline. There was no shortage of downtime in these places and my release depending upon a perfect illusion of normalcy.

Every day, all day long I self monitored my expression, my posture, my voice and words. I was forced to learn to maintain total composure and submissiveness under the stress of living in this place. Buoyed by the possibilities I gained a spark of hope which helped keep from being genuinely depressed. I studiously learned to control my pressurized speech and constant fidgeting from the energy racing in my head. I basically used self applied cognitive behavioral therapy. In short, I learned to conceal both the depression and the manic symptoms flawlessly. A performance under constant observation.

There were several consequences of my decision to go off meds. For one, my grandparents, upon hearing I went off meds refused to let me step foot in the house again thus terminating my occasional weekend breaks from the facility.

Second, my social worker called and said, “You went off your meds? That’s noncompliance! You think you are ever going to get out of there if you can’t show compliance with your treatment? You are in a lot of trouble you had better get back on your meds right away.”

I then leaned on my guardian ad litem. I explained that I wished to apply for a writ of habeas corpus. I had not been depressed or manic, neither suicidal or psychotic in two months. All my reports were perfect. I was a model resident apparently free of my illness and no longer on meds which I said had not helped me at all. I wanted out. I was stuck here, not being treated for anything.

My guardian ad litem squared off with my social worker in court over this since my SW refused to consider taking me out of that facility. I was allowed to speak to a judge and I pled my side of the story. I admitted that yes, I had had problems, but what teenager does not have emotional problems? It’s part of puberty and growing up. Yes I may have had a rough childhood, rougher than some, but less rough than others but that was no reason to force me to serve out the rest of my teen years confined in treatment on drugs that don’t help.

He listened to me. He pointed to my social worker and told her to make it happen and find a less restrictive placement for me at once.

I did not have to go back on meds and I had learned how to mask my symptoms from the outside world. I still hated myself, The manic and schizo affective tendencies where still there. I still wanted to die. I now knew how to project an artificial personality that could pass as *normal* when I was far from it deep inside. I learned how to control the outward, visible symptoms, without using drugs at all. I had no choice whatsoever but to impose my will on my behavior.

In this video I talk about the specifics of learning to control bipolar mania.

I chose to go off meds because I could not stand to be on them one second longer. It was a complete internal revulsion and rejection of what the meds had done to me. You could not convince me to taper off them if you tried. I wanted to be free of the *therapeutic* effects of those drugs post haste. Not one month, or two or three or six months down the line, I wanted my body back immediately. I wanted my thoughts back *now*. Every cell of my body, every nerve, every beat of my heart, every breath I took demanded it.

Later I was told that all sorts of horrible things could have happened to me coming off those drugs, at those doses, that completely. No one took it upon themselves to inform me of withdrawal. What do you mean, withdrawal, this kid is not withdrawing off anything, this kid is to be medicated for life. That was the treatment plan. Even had I known, it would have not daunted me or slowed me down in the slightest. I was a teen and I did not want to be on drugs anymore.

You have to understand. Every day I was on meds, I felt violated, damaged, hollow and filthy. I was not myself. I was disgusted with the perpetual side effects. By going off meds swiftly, those side effects went away quickly. Nothing less than immediate freedom from psych med influence was acceptable. There is a point where you draw a mental line in the sand and say no more, not one second will I tolerate this. That is how and why I went off psyche meds, against recommendations, in violation of my treatment plan, without the knowledge or supervision of my supervising psychiatrist.

People seem to be surprised when they hear how people like the NUI shooter was ” anything but a monster. He was probably the nicest, most caring person ever.” Pressure and stress can cause a person to partition their mind and project different personality’s.

I know at least, that thanks to my psychiatry nightmare experience I learned to conceal any evidence of my constant internal suffering from even mental heath workers at close contact with me. I learned how to hide it better and more effectively than before for fear of ever being *treated* for my problems again.

Over on my youtube channel I made videos complaining about these side effects and lo and behold I get people who says thing like this.

From someone calling himself

risperidone786

“I am sorry for you, you must go to your psychiatrist and I am sure he will find an alternative medication .I know side effects are troublesome, but medication is the mainstay of psychosis/bipolar .I know no shrink wants to give us side effects, but for me , I know suicide risk is high in psychosis and bipolar, at least these drugs make me live! Side effects ? I would rather live and bear some sleepwalking ,than attempt suicide or put myself in situations in which i might hurt myself.”

I said “It is no one’s responsibility to keep you alive. You must find a reason to live.”

I can’t say I understand at all why, when anyone experiences bad reactions, they go back for more! Once you have these things in your system and realized that you are still the same inside, how can you say, ‘doc let’s try a different drug’?

I am constitutionally incapable of understanding why people keep playing with different meds. Nor do I understand the attraction of trading out side effect profiles to subject yourself to other, different side effect profiles. I don’t understand how either a patient or a doctor can say. “Well let’s put you/ try me on something else, and see how that goes.”

People ask me why I did not try other meds other than lithium or perphenazine. I ask back, “how can you even ask me that after I just told you what I suffered while on them?”

The nightmares in your head can not be cured by any pill. You can’t get self love and self esteem from a bottle. It comes only from inside.

I am biased by my experiences and I know it. It is hard to refrain from being judgmental of adults who willingly play with medication after medication. I knew as a teenager these were ineffective at healing my problems as well as being toxic to my normal function. I was unable to bullshit myself into thinking this was for the better, for my own good, or preferable to living in my normal undrugged state.

Perhaps someone will come along and explain it to me.

A few weeks ago I made a video preliminary to this post on my youtube channel.

Recently after catching up on one of my favorite blogs Furious Seasons I encountered yet again the mental health doomcallers of the internets. These doomcallers have a singular belief that major mental health problems, namely personality disorders and Axis 1 spectrum diagnoses are incurable diseases.

Nothing could be further from the truth.

In March of 1995 I made good on a promise I made a year earlier. Namely that once I got my life back to a minimal standard, I would try to kill myself once and for all, and do it right.

Since I was seven years old I had been in love with death. Between the ages of 14 and 20 I had made five major suicide attempts and several minor quasi attempts. The only genuine cry for help attention getting suicide attempt was the first. I reported my survival of a suicide attempt to my grandparents and was promptly hospitalized. My life changed from bad to worse soon after and every suicide attempt afterward was *for real*.

So it was that in March of 1995 I shut down my life in a calm and orderly fashion. I quit my job, closed my accounts, paid some bills, packed all my earthly possessions and wrote a detailed last will and testimony. For a week I drove around the coastal and forest country roads enjoying my last days to the fullest. Finally I collected my suicide kit and took myself to a reasonably isolated area at night and euthanized myself. Despite my best planning, I botched the job in a classic how-not-commit suicide blunder. I was dying….slowly. I had failed to get the plastic bag and rubber band around my head. Thus daylight came, exposing my vehicle through the trees and a passing police patrol car investigated.

I woke up in a hospital with tubes coming out of me days afterward having been in a brief coma. That earned me a seven day stay at the hospital psych ward. I signed myself out and planned on trying again soonest.

Several factors stayed my hand for the first week. I was recovering from my failed suicide attempt on my own. Only my brother and my best friend knew what I had done and I had sworn them both to secrecy. I had a documented history of teenage bipolar and schizophrenia and I feared my family being involved in any way.

So I literally hid from the world at my friends house in a rural area. This was actually the beginning of my healing although I did not wholly perceive this at that time.

I needed rest, a long rest from my life and my existence. One way or another it all had to change because the life I lived in the outer world as well as my own inner world were both unacceptable.

Here at my friends house I was permitted to be left the hell alone. I had a outdoor bench swing positioned underneath a pair of giant pine trees with an enormous, expansive view of cornfields and woods. The house was set back about 500 feet off the main road on a long and bending dirt driveway. My friend lived here and he took care of me. Basically he kept me in cigarettes, pot, coffee and frozen dinners. No pressure. He left me alone as I requested. I spent my first day back from the hospital like that. All day I sat on this swing and stared into the distance seeing everything and nothing.

The place was magical. So far off the road, acres in all directions before the nearest house it was deeply quiet. No human voices, no sound of cars. Just the buzzing of the bees, the songs of birds, the wind in the corn. Peaceful. I had my back to the house and faced forward. I felt safe. No one knew I was here. That felt safe. No one bothered me. I survived that day and did much the same again the next day. Then again the day after.

One day at a time. A simple ritual to remain alive.

Wake up, get up. Take my coffee and cigs out to the swing and sit quietly. Stay in the swing all day, all afternoon, all evening. Nothing to do. No where to go. No responsibilities. I sat and stared.

I did this for two weeks straight. It was perhaps one of the most therapeutic things I had ever done. I was deeply calm and centered with the afterglow of my near death experience. Mentally and emotionally, I was calm and quiet. Something I had never before truly achieved in my life. One day at a time I simply existed. I harmed no one. Day by day went by with no stress, no arguing or fighting, nothing to trigger me or set me off. Nothing to do but relax and take stock of what to do.

Eventually I became in tune with the rhythms of nature. My life cycled with the day. I gave myself over to watching both the dawn and the sunset every single day.

I realized that I could stay alive, if I could recreate this ritual every single day. It was a formula for staying alive and taking some pleasure out of life without adding stress to my life. Although I did not fully realize it at that time. I had discovered the most important thing about stress. Namely that by dodging all stress voluntarily, I had escaped life and all the things that set me off. That lack of accumulating daily stress was gradually healing me.

I made a simple goal. Live one day at a time and try to engineer a situation where I could recreate this lifestyle until further notice. I could not stay here forever so I formulated my plan. I would re enter life only so much as needed to maintain a standard of living.

There was nothing I had to do and nothing that needed to be done. There was no way I could be a productive member of society when I had no reason to live. Planning for a future was not even a remote possibility for me. Careers and families are what people who have lives do. I did not have a life worth living and so it made no sense that I could possibly aspire to such lofty goals.

Hard decisions needed to be made and I made them. The results of those decisions and the trial and error methods of self therapy that I undertook out of sheer desperation can be distilled in 12 steps

In this post I will outline 12 steps to permanent recovery from mental illness. Not just bipolar, but also schizo affective disorder with narcissistic tendencies and PTSD.

Here we go.

Location:

The first hard but necessary decision I made was to leave my home state. Within 200 miles of the city I was born in lay most of the places I had grown up in with all the memories and triggers that come with them. The family that had harmed me, and the family that I had harmed were all within this zone. The cops knew me by name on site here and there. I had been fired from two dozen jobs within this zone in less than two years. All my Exes and friends, most everyone that had ever harmed me, or I them, lay within this zone. This zone was the in the center of New England. A place with a bipolar climate with rapid cycling weather.

I was triggered by the entire state. The places the persons and the weather. It all weighed on me. So, I needed to escape. I could not face another winter while I was this vulnerable. Where was I written that I had to stay in the area I was born in? Just because most everyone on both side of my family did, did not mean I had to. I had no compelling reason to stay. Everyone had given up on me. With few friends and no family support there was nothing for me here except more of the same.

The first thing I did was work through the spring and summer. I saved my money and sold off my possessions. In the fall of 1995, just as the leaves were turning colors, I escaped and moved to California.

Although I remained suicidal I persevered through extreme poverty until I was once again gainfully employed and the first thing I did when I had enough money was move into a simple apartment by myself in modest and moderately quiet neighborhood.

More than anything I needed to be alone as much as possible. I had a responsibility to society as an *unmanaged and untreated mentally ill person* I sequestered myself from society for everyone’s good. The task was made infinitely easier that I was now 3000 miles away from all family and friends. I swore off relationships indefinitely. Really as a self harming, self hating deeply suicidal individual I had no business suckering people into relationships with me just to comfort myself. Nor did I have any business having children. I am the child of abusive parenting and the juvenile mental health system. In no way was I capable of being a parent. I knew better than to even think about it. It was all I could do just get through the day.

I reasserted as much of my daily ritual as I could. Namely I got up, sat in the dark smoking my cigarettes and drinking my coffee in silence while watching the sun come up. After an eight or ten hour workday, I came home and repeated the ritual until the sun went down. Bolstered by the far superior climate, free of the stress of relatives and friends and all social life bit by bit I relaxed in my solitude. I stayed alive, one day at a time. My only goal, to repeat my ritual every single day until further notice.

Living:

After choosing a better climate and earning my solitude I focused on simplicity. Since most of my income went to rent, food and drugs I had little to spend on anything else. I had arrived in California with a few bags and boxes containing my one real treasure. My books.

I worked a blue color lifestyle, living paycheck to paycheck. I walked, bussed and biked to work. I needed no car and could not afford psychologically or financially, the nickel and dime maintenance of the purchase of a heavily used car. One less stress, deliberately dodged. The net effect was that I spent more time in commute but stayed healthier physically and financially. My apartment was sparse consisting of lucky sidewalk sale finds or abandoned furniture. I slept on the floor in an empty bedroom. I had a couch, an easy chair, some lamps, my book shelves and books, a coffee table. A simple and sparsely equipped kitchen to match. With few possessions it was easy to keep everything clean and neat and tidy. I had a large amount of space to move and breathe. I kept my apartment much like a zen monastery. I became quite happy living simply and humbly, poor and alone. It was all I wanted. It was all I could handle.

Entertainment:

With no spare cash it was hard to afford entertainment. I lived without Tv, cable, videos, computers. All I had was my CDs and my books and my drugs. I enjoyed all three, every single day. I forgot about the world. Stopped reading the news. Stopped caring about anything else other than myself and staying alive and calm, one day at a time.

Diet:

As time went by I gained more confidence, more control and more stability over my life. I found myself in a space where I could experiment with food and supplements. After reading numerous books on diet and nutrition it finally dawned on me that I was never taught how to take care of myself and that the American food system is severely compromised in many ways. So I played with my diet. I tried eating all meat diet before anyone had ever heard of Atkins. I ate macrobiotic, vegetarian, vegan, took up fasting. Once I learned what the RDA actually meant on foods, I began taking supplements convinced that since I had left State’s custody two year earlier, I had been malnourished. I had stopped drinking plain water after my lithium nightmare at age 14. The effects of taking vitamins and supplements and drinking water as well as eating fruits and vegetables was immediate and profound. Within a week I looked and felt better.

Body:

In 1996 my body betrayed me while at work. My right arm became paralyzed while I was moving heavy objects over my head. Since I had no marketable skills and used my body for manual labor tasking, having one arm malfunction was an immediate emergency.

I had no insurance and little money so what could I do? As luck would have it I met a chiropractor who was also a Reiki practitioner and we were a good match. He took some upper body Xrays and he showed me what was wrong.

Under the years and years of muscular and neurological tension, the combination of the strain of the years, untreated physical problems form car accidents and injuries and perhaps even congenital birth defect. My overall body balance was warped. I was twisted and tortured internally by my own structure. My first ribs on both sides were migrating towards my clavicle, the right side rib was nearly touching my collarbone. My floating ribs were fused to the ribs about them. I had cervical vertebrae degeneration from whiplash and neck injuries. My entire torso, starting from my shoulders and all the way to my pelvis was torqued and twisted.

Without health insurance and a small fortune I could not afford complicated secondary testing procedures, consultations, specialists or surgeons. With limited finances I had to turn to a self therapy modality that offered the hope of healing my body holistically.

For that we turn to…

Exercise:

There is an awful lot of things you can do to quicken your pulse but not all of them reduce stress while building physical, emotional and mental strength. Skating, snowboarding, jogging, karate, weight training can all work out your body. Each of them contains possibilities of damaging your body suddenly or over time. Each of them requires their own gear or special facilities. None of those things will necessarily rehab your mind and body and emotions.

I turned to Tai Chi and Qi Gong. After reading several books on the subject I chose to start training in Taoist Energy Arts. I saved my paychecks and took seminars, retreats and classes with Master Bruce Frantzis. I studied his Qi Gong, Tai Chi, Hsin I and Ba Gua. Once I had a basic working understanding and instruction the next step was to practice as much as I could. Gradually I began with fifteen to thirty minute workouts. As I became stronger I worked harder and longer. Eventually I could practice for an hour, then two. Then eventually three, then four, five and six hours.

In 1996 my life was now focused entirely on my practice of self healing.

4 am, wakeup

4:30 am, bike down to the river and warm up with qi gong and move into tai chi. Greet the sun as it came up.

Work out until 7:30. Bike to work.

From 8 am to 4 pm, monday through friday, punch a clock at the warehouse.

4:30 pm, I am home. Take 30 minutes, smoke a joint. Bike back down to the river.

5:oo pm, I begin again, qi gong for an hour, tai chi for two hours. Watch the sun go down.

8:30, bike home

9:00 pm, dinner.

9:30 go to bed

4 am, start all over.

On weekends without work, I simply got up at 5 am instead and spent the entire day down in the park working out in shifts. 2 hours of tai chi, hour long break, another 2 hours of tai chi, take an hour off, repeat until dusk.

Gradually I trained myself to relax. I repatterned my body’s soft tissues and structures.

Gradually I developed a smooth, agile, sensitive, alive and graceful movement with power and precision.

The act of tasking the mind to command the body down to precise movements inside myself strengthened my focus and my will. Gradually, the chemical imbalance caused by 20 years of depression slowly rebalanced, a little bit each day, the same way I fell out of balance.

With my diet, stress and body now under control. I was changing. I was in a new space with a new resolve built off success and practice. It was time to take the next step.

Detox:

For years I was fiercely dependent upon and habituated to several chemicals. I was now willing to experiment with removing the crutches I depended on for so long to cope with myself and my life.

It was time to detox. I had been a heavy smoker of both cigarettes and marijuana. I drank 40 plus ounces of coffee a day and drank a two liter bottle of pepsi a day. I was dependent on nicotine, caffeine, marijuana, and sugar.

I detoxed cold turkey in one of the most mentally, physically and emotionally agonizing self inflicted treatment I have ever done. The first time around I failed to quit cannabis, and instead, relied upon it even heavier to deal with the multiple withdrawals occurring at once.

Much the same way as heroin users are given methadone or benzos to deal with the multilevel pains of heroin detox I relied on massive doses of cannabis. I could not practice meditation during that time and instead, I suffered in solitude. I stayed away from everyone not wishing to burden my few acquaintances with my problems and moods while engrossed in my own suffering.

I did learn a lesson from the sheer agony of the withdrawal and when it was time to detach from my cannabis addiction I tapered myself on my own until I was capable of relying only on tai chi and meditation for my support.

Distance:

Some of distance I covered before here and there and it is worth mentioning again. Misery loved company. When I was in my late teens I was unable to find and attract healthy people to me. Instead I tended to gravitate to the wounded and the damaged personalities. Other mentally ill people with problems like mine.

There is all sorts of distance to be maintained for myriad reasons.

Distance from maternal family. Not hard. Most everyone on that side has severe untreated mental illness and a history of physical and psycho emotional violence and drama. I could not save them, they could not save me.

Distance from paternal family. Most of that family is of the WASP cast. Self sufficient and distant. I had only access to my grandparents. I abused and used them terribly while humiliating them with my mental health problems and criminal activities. I chose to exile myself from them in the hopes of minimizing the danger of my personality to them.

Distance from mentally ill friends. Necessary. Can not save them. Am not responsible for them. Can not make the changes I need to in my life, when all my friends are users, depressives, borderlines, deadbeats, neurotic welfare cases. Painful but necessary to cut them loose and focus on my survival and not maintain sick relationships with sick people.

Distance from society. With the exception of work, once a week shopping and martial arts classes, I exiled myself from the warp and woof of humanity in order to stay stress free and uncomplicated. Nothing was allowed to derail or interrupt my self imposed mind body discipline and asceticism.

I maintained my distance to distraction. You can not be focusing six hours a day on self therapy if you are out roller blading with your girlfriends or making the scene at the clubs. You can’t. Like wise you can not focus six hours a day on only you if you have a girlfriend, boyfriend or a child. You can not give those people the necessary attention to forge and cultivate relationships. You have to have undisturbed dedicated me time.

In a narcissistic twist, you have to acknowledge your selfish investment in your own life. You are the most important person in your world. Your whole life revolves around you. That is exactly how it should be. If you are not dragging dependent or expectant people around, no one will be harmed by your necessary selfishness. You know you are not capable for forging relationships with others when you can not spare the time to deal with them. So stay away from them. Besides, now that you are changing as a person, you may find you are no longer attracted to those broken and hollow people that you were before.

Beliefs:

Your beliefs about your life and your condition have everything to do with whether or not you can take over responsibility for your life and your recovery. Although I am reluctant to scapegoat religion, religion poses a serious threat to your spiritual wellbeing.

Take these examples.

My Bipolar mother, convinced that there is nothing wrong with her, believes that her depression is a burden of life. It is cross she was given to bear from God himself. She truly believes that if God did not want her depressed, He would shine His divine countenance on her and remove the depression. In the meantime, all she can hope for is to cling to her cigarettes and rosary, pray every day to make sure she goes to Heaven and wait for the afterlife to enjoy peace and joy. That is a self destructive belief that will never render a cure.

Likewise, I take personal issue with several of the Alcoholics 12 steps to recovery as well.

Talk about a recipe for helplessness

• Step 1 – We admitted we were powerless over our mental health diagnoses – that our lives had become unmanageable
• Step 2 – Came to believe that a Power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity
• Step 3 – Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God
• Step 5 – Admitted to God, to ourselves and to another human being the exact nature of our wrongs
• Step 6 – Were entirely ready to have God remove all these defects of character

• Step 7 – Humbly asked God to remove our shortcomings

Let us look at this closely. The person that came up with these steps to *serenity* quite probably never knew about Yoga and yogis. Those mind and body masters of the Far East capable of controlling their body, their mind, and their emotions to a level unthinkable by most Westerners. Just to be able to sit still for hours at a time without distraction or idle thinking is a practice beyond most people in this culture. It requires mental discipline to control your mind and body to that extent.

We are not worried about sitting naked on a block of ice or sleeping on a bed of nails. We just want a basic level of impulse control and thought control. To do that, we must do the opposite of those  serenity steps you must

Admit to yourself that yes, your life had become unmanageable but deep inside us all lies the power to make major changes and that power means we are far from helpless.

You can not wait around forever hoping some deity will take time out of running the universe just to visit you and make your life a little more bearable whilst ignoring the other billion inhabitants on this earth that lay claim to needed help just as much you. You have to say this is the time and place that I chose to regain control of my life.The only person capable of restoring sanity to you in your lifetime is you.

Again I take personal offense at the inspired selfishness and helplessness that goes into these serenity steps. Why are you so important to the functioning of the universe that god most come answer your humble call to remove the shortcoming that He in his divinity saw fit to give you to strengthen and humble you? Why do you deserve god to help you personally and not again the other billions of people with a need as well? What have you done with your life that has earned divine intervention?

Those steps to serenity are basically selfish affirmations of helplessness and disempowerment. If God could not spare me and my brothers and sisters the years of abuse, why should God come along and spare you from your alcoholism? Why do you deserve God’s interference and we do not? I asked. I begged and prayed for intervention back when I believed and it never happened. Now you want God to come and pluck your defects away because you can’t handle it anymore. What ever happened to God helps those that help themselves?

I gave up on God a long time ago. When I chose to undertake self healing it was because I knew, it was up to no one, mortal or immortal to heal me for me. The only person capable of healing me is me. I finally wanted it bad enough to make it happen no matter the cost.

That is why I say, reviewing your beliefs is majorly important if you want to heal yourself. You can’t heal yourself if you are waiting for God to do it, or if you think your mental problems are your burden in life. Those beliefs are useless to the person that is bent on recovery. You agree that you take full responsibility for your behavior. It is not your astrological sign, your karma, your genes, or your cross. It is entirely up to you whether or not you want to spend the rest of your life mentally ill. It is that simple. Accept no beliefs that pass the buck off to agencies or deities. Your behavior is controllable and you will do it. It is that or suffer until you die.

Meditation:

I have written much about meditation already. This post covers everything I have to say about meditation. Meditation, mental health and the brain.

Meditation was the Rosetta Stone, the real cure for my brain.

Self Love:

Some people never give it a thought. Many people, if asked are not entirely sure one way or the other. I knew though. I loathed myself. I hated myself since I was a child. I felt like an alien. I hated my existence, my life, my body, everything about myself.

The most powerful meditation experience of my life occurred towards the end of my 25th year. I had become more and more comfortable with myself and my life by sticking to my regimen. I had learned to relax and let go. I had mastered stress management. I had control over my life. I had not been depressed in years. Thousands of hours of meditation had stilled my racing thoughts. Until that experience, I did not truly love myself. After this meditation experience I did. Once I gained true unconditional, unambiguous and total self love, I no longer wanted to die. I now had a reason to live. I knew I would never self injure again. Indeed, ever since then, I have been in balance and free of suicidal depression.

Labels:

Once you have achieved recovery, what use is the label? No matter what is it. Once I had resolved all my triggers, I was no longer suffering from PTSD. The label no longer accurately described my behavior so I dropped it. Once the delusions and egocentricity as well as the Voices had left me, I was no longer Schizoaffective. One the depression and mania had left me. I was no longer Bipolar. It was time to move on and get over having ever been mentally ill. One of my personal secrets is this. I never believed I had a lifelong disease in my mental health problems. I was indoctrinated into believing I had various chemical imbalances beyond my control due to genetics.

Certainly, if you look at my bipolar mother and sister, the hereditary disposition is undeniably obvious. My mother was the head bipolar vampire who manufactured one mentally ill child after another. Of her first four children I alone am recovered. My mother is incapable of believing she has any problems so, she remains untreated and symptomatic. My sister, now in the clutches of the mental health system, is currently being programmed to believe that like the alcoholic, she is powerless over her genetic mental health problems. She is receiving the standard dual therapies of medications and counseling. She lives in an adult group home, disabled by her mental problems. She is not recovering. She is, in the psychiatric jargon, learning to accept her diagnoses and the treatments. With one brother in jail and the other with his periodic cycling depressions, family mental illness is endemic. How is it I am no longer mentally ill? I took the path least traveled, and it made all the difference.

As a teen and as an adult, I knew I had problems. I was never in denial that I was mentally ill. When you are living on the street homeless, addicted, penniless, with bench warrants for your arrest for petty crimes. When your family has given up on you and you have given up on them, When you try to commit suicide every other year and destroy your own relationships and employment. It is hard to deny the evidence before your eyes. I was clinically insane for a long long time. Now I am sane. The steps I took directly led to that sanity. No one in my family has taken those steps.

To summarize in no particular order.

Step 1 distance, distance from anyone that is toxic or abusive or anyone that will not facilitate your recovery. In short, if they have worse mental health problems than you, stay away from them.

Step 2 location, where is it written that you have to suffer the climate you were born to? Who said? I was raised in New England, and New England is depressing. So I moved to sunny California and staved off SAD and felt genuinely better to have more sun and blue skies than than I had grown up with.

Step 3. Lifestyle. Our American lifestyle is stress overload. Who said you have to participate? Get off the stress track. Quit your job if you must. Live simply. I became quite happy living poor and alone. Much like the Taoist sages of ancient China.

Step 4. Diet. When you hate yourself it is much harder to make motivated healthy choices and take up good healthy eating habits. You have to experiment with food and how it can support your mental health through augmenting your physical health.

Step 5 detox. Toxins abound in our society. All of them we can do without. The caffeine, the alcohol, the uppers and downers, the psych meds, cigarettes, sugars, processed foods. Seriously, get rid of all that, and see how healthy you can become.

Step 6 Body. Back problems, weight problems, structural problems, congenital birth defects, diseases, all that stuff complicates and exacerbates stress and mental health problems. All those things must be addressed in order to find yourself underneath it all.

Step 7 Exercise. A walk around the block is just not enough to get your body to burn off weight and raise seratonin levels. There are many sports and activities that just add stress and require specialized equipment or having repetitive risks associated with them.

Tai Chi requires nothing but the clothes on your body and decent shoes. With yoga, people still crave comfort in mats, spaces and outfits. Tai Chi is simple. Stand up and do it. In your home, in your backyard, at a park. Once learned, you never need other people around you or a special area. You can do tai chi and it will both strengthen and relax, your body, emotions and mind. It really is the most brilliantly engineered exercise ever created.

Step 8, check your beliefs. If you believe you truly have a cross to bear in your mental problems or you are waiting for the day God comes down and fixes you, you will never recover. If you believe you have in incurable genetic disease, you will never recover. Both beliefs must go.

Step 9, Meditate. When I started meditation, I could not sit still for more than ten minutes. Today, I can sit for days at a time without interruption, easily. Meditation builds that circuit in your brain which controls mental and emotional processing. I have that circuit, as does any serious meditator whether they be yoga, buddhist, zen, taoist, whatever. I built that circuit and chances are, you have not. Work on it.

Step 10, self love. Once again, without it, you are bound to self injure or self destruct sooner or later. With it, you will not be depressed, even if you are poor and alone, you will be content.

Step 11 entertainment. Say have you seen the news lately? Depressing isn’t it? Frustrated by politics, sports, absorbed in the lives of others? If your spare time amounts to getting emotionally worked up by reading horrible psychiatry nightmares or watching war footage in Iraq, how is that reducing stress and putting you in a calm state? That is not to say you can never do those things. I am just saying, in the initial stages of recovery, when your sanity is literally a house of thin cards swaying in the breeze. It is unwise to burden yourself with stress by constantly exposing yourself to stressful entertainment or research until you are emotionally stable

Step 12. Lose the label. Do it first or do it last, either way, you are not your diagnoses. It is not you. It may describe your behaviors when you are symptomatic, but do not identify your personality as being diseased or there is no hope for you. When you are no longer symptomatic, lose the label, really it no longer matters, it has no power over you.

For years after my recovery I simply moved on. I no longer needed to meditate six hours a day to stay clear and calm. I had built mental stability into my system and was now capable of re-entering society and doing the things I had put off since age 20. I was able to make friends, have fun, be social, keep a job, have romantic relationships, make career plans. I could add stress to my life, and not become manic or depressed. I was normal. I could handle *normal mainstream life* again. I put the past behind me and moved on. Eventually I got back onto the internet and discovered that while I was curing myself of manic depression, bipolar had morphed into an epidemic and I realized the time had finally come to speak up.