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.

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.

Today I released a video on my channel about the use of drugs and meditation progression.

This is for anyone who is interested in the relationship between bipolar or schizophrenic psych meds and meditation. It is also for anyone who is interested in the relationship between other drugs such as pot and meditation, alcohol and meditation, hallucinogens and meditation, anti psychotics and meditation, anti anxiety meds, muscle relaxants, pain killers, aspirin etc.

This video is a talk about different drug effects and how they will help or hinder your meditation progress and why. I am not recommending any drug use at all nor am I offering medical advice. It is a candid discussion about the experience of meditating under the influence of different substances.

Drugs, Meditation and Spirituality

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.

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.”