Spiritual Practice Inside And Out

Winter begins early around here, usually around Thanksgiving.  We've gotten a lot of snow and temperatures have been low and I've been inside my house for over three days.  I managed to detach from the Jesus delusion.  It's been a particularly stubborn delusion and whenever I come out of it I dip into some depression.  I've heard this is a typical reaction for people who suffer from psychotic disorders which makes sense.  You go up too high and then you swing down low once you realize that your position is really (and always has been) humble.  But truly humble is a good place to be because that is the reality for all of us here on earth.  It's so easy to lose sight of the fact that we are merely animals on one of many habitable planets.  Especially hard for those of us who either swing towards delusions of grandeur or who are in positions of power over other human animals.

So Winter is here and I'm moving inward and staying home more often.  It's a time of greater reflection.  On some levels I'm quite content.  I have food, shelter, heat, water, cats for company, a functioning car, a healthy spine and the ability to move, my five senses and a lot more.  I feel blessed.  And the discomfort I feel off and on throughout the day is a blessing, too.  It spurs me to seek out the truth, especially about myself.  Discomfort in necessary for spiritual development.  There would be no reason to change for the better without it.

Lately I've been realizing that I don't know what a truly healthy way of living would be.  I have done a lot of studying about mental illness (and I include the study of addiction in this), but not a lot of study about definitions of health.  I do have some sense of it.  Learning new ways to reduce stress in life is very important.  Stress is a big factor in mental illness.  It seems as if we are guided in this culture to take on more and more responsibilities - serious relationships, children, education (and debts), career, owning a home, etc....  It is mind boggling to me what people choose to do with their lives before they've even dealt with and resolved the issues generated from their childhood and youth with their families and communities.

There is a trend happening here with people choosing to be single, choosing to spend more time with themselves and not tangled up in relationships.  I think this is a good thing because it guides individuals towards self reflection and taking care of themselves.  They keep the focus on themselves instead of on codependency with others.  This is especially important with those of us who suffer from addictions.  The solutions to our problems are not out there somewhere, but inside of us.  Connections to others, healthy friends, healthy support groups, therapists and counselors, supportive family members are all very important, but the first step starts inside.  Individuals facing themselves nakedly and honestly.

Too many people who are very involved in codependent relationships with each other and their children are very afraid to be alone.  They don't believe that they can find happiness within themselves.  They are always looking outside of themselves to family, friends, lovers, work and their children.  It's clear to me that that approach does not work and leaves our personal unhappiness intact.    What's needed is privacy, a room of one's own, a pad and pen or a computer and word processing program.  There are two questions to ask:  What's right in my life?  What's wrong in my life?  It's important to start with what's right and if you really look at it there is a lot right in you and around you, but you have to focus on it and value it.  We tend to overlook the obvious such as our ability to breath and move, to feel and think, to have food, water and shelter.  All these things put us in a very precious position.  It is a position of freedom, the freedom to grow emotionally, mentally and spiritually.

Make a practice of not overlooking the obvious.  Don't take your life and your abilities for granted.  When you value all the elements of your life from good health to a good cup of coffee or tea to a good night's sleep, you change your viewpoint from a sense of deprivation to a sense of abundance.  Placing value on your experiences is a practice of gratitude regardless of whether you believe in some kind of Higher Power or not.  Once you have established this spiritual practice, you can then go to work on the question - What's wrong with my life?  After you've written a gratitude list, make a grievance list.  Once you've got the list, take each item separately on a new page and dig deeper.  Ask questions such as, when have I felt like this before?  You will find that many of your grievances stem back to childhood and adolescence.

We all get to the point where our youth ends and adulthood begins, no matter how hard you resist it.  When this happens our memories of childhood and youth submerge into our unconscious or subconscious.  We forget our beginnings and that is where we begin to go astray.  Unresolved relationships with family and friends still get played out in present day relationships.  The cycle of illness continues without any conscious choice.  Self awareness is the only thing that will begin to get us to detach from our patterns.  Sitting down with yourself in a room of your own, in privacy, and making simple lists is how to regain awareness of where you started and what happened and where you are now.  No matter how disjointed life can seem, life is continuous.  There is a logic to how you got to this place in time and inside the logic there is a lot of personal meaning.

Discovering meaning in your life through becoming aware of the patterns in your life is very satisfying.  That's the hook into health.  But again, it requires the daily practice of you facing yourself and getting honest.  The problems you face now are being faced by countless other people who have lived inside dysfunctional families and have encountered and been ensnared by addictions of all sorts.  You are not alone.  Help is more available now than it was in the past with computers, therapy and self help groups.  The telephone alone is a godsend.  Reaching out is a key to health, but so is reaching inward and doing the work every day.  Both practices, reaching inward and reaching outward, are spiritual practices, the spiritual practice and necessity of taking care of ourselves.

The I Ching

The I Ching is an ancient Chinese oracle that I first discovered when I was a teenager going through my mother's large selection of books.  She actually had two books on the I Ching one translated by John Blofeld and one translated by Richard Wilhelm.  I still have both books decades later.  I looked at the Blofeld book first but later worked a lot more with the Wilhelm book.  I remember being respectful of the book, prostrating myself three times before consulting it.  I had learned to be respectful from first using Tarot cards which I had purchased in a Westhampton Beach NY bookstore at the tender age of twelve.  With the Tarot cards I was full of questions about "the boys" and tried not to get too scared when I got either the Devil card or the Death card.  I learned that "white magic" was the way to go and "black magic" would hurt me deeply if I pursued it.  And really I wanted to be good and respectful because I knew I was delving into something powerful.

I guess that I approached both the Tarot cards and the I Ching with caution and a bit of fear.  I really did want answers, but I didn't know if I was strong enough to face the truth if it was not in my favor.  With the Tarot cards I was connected to the higher power through cards, very visual and very symbolic filled cards, but with the I Ching I was connected through first tossing three coins and then through reading a book, more specifically the the book of change, the I Ching.  The I Ching, too, was very visual and symbolic but through words instead of drawn images.  The natural world and the world of human relationships figures prominently in the I Ching.  The purpose of the book, of consulting it, it to teach the practice and rewards of virtue.  The goal is to transform into a superior person often symbolized by a just king or a wise sage.

The book of change, when used wisely, is a training manual.  The teacher is the Sage or the Higher Power if you will.  When you consult it you are the student and to gain the most out of the interaction you must work hard.  There are many, many translations of it and many, many interpretations of the main text of it.  So far, I have about eleven translations each with their own interpretations.  It is easy to get lost or overwhelmed by all the information in these books.  I have done that.  I am learning, slowly, that intuition and insight are crucial to working with the oracle.  And it requires patience, respect and strict honesty.  It also requires time and study.

I have returned to working with the I Ching at certain crucial points in my life, but I only stick with it for a month or two and then move away from it again.  Perhaps this is due to the fact that I suffer from schizoaffective disorder and the study of the I Ching can lead to obsessiveness.  My goal in life is to live a balanced life, so sometimes I need to step away from it.  Right now I am moving towards it again.  I rejoined a site formerly called Clarity and now called I Ching With Clarity created and run by a very intelligent and talented woman named Hilary Barrett.  She wrote and published her own book on the I Ching called I Ching: Walking Your Path, Creating Your Future, an insightful and sensitive translation and interpretation of the I Ching.  I took an email exchange course with her in 2007 which was also very good.  At that point I was five years into my recovery from schizoaffective disorder.  Now I am nearly fifteen years into my recovery, though I did have a relapse two years ago.  A year before I went into the delusion and paranoia of psychosis I was instructed by my voices, which till I got sick had been my guides and teachers for about ten years, to study the I Ching seriously, which I did.  I believe this was moral and spiritual training to prepare me for the descent into madness.

During the first three and a half years of psychosis, the acute stage of the illness, I consulted the I Ching on and off again when I was balanced enough to do so.  It helped me a great deal.  It steered me away from acting out when I was particularly upset for which I will always be grateful.  Because psychosis is often about ego imbalance, it is easy to get lost in my interpretation of the answers I receive from the oracle.  Luckily, I have returned to a more modest assessment of myself and my situation in life and can approach the oracle with much more balance than before.  As some of you know from reading this blog I strongly believe in a Higher Power, though I cannot define it clearly.  The I Ching is just another wonderful connection to that Higher Power.  More than anything I want to learn because I am a Truth seeker.  The I Ching is always available to teach me.  I'm hoping that I can go more deeply into my studies with it and learn a lot.

For anyone interested in studying the I Ching with others, here's the link to Hilary Barrett's site:

I Ching With Clarity

Praying For Continued Motivation

I have been praying off and on for a while to organize and clean my home.  It's been a serious problem for me ever since I went into psychosis.  This Monday I began the process and worked all day organizing my studio space in my living room.  I knew that if I wanted to keep up with doing artwork at home that I needed to have easy access to my supplies and books.  I succeeded in creating a work station, but the rest of my home is in disarray.  I have another work station in my dining room area where I keep my support books and journals.  Because I've been moving things that area is a mess and so far today I don't want to deal with it yet.

And then there is my library room which is overflowing with books.  I've been gradually transferring my art books to my living room work space, which is exciting because I haven't looked at them seriously in years and I have many good books, thanks in part to my mother who had great taste in giving me books as presents.  I managed to pack up three boxes of books to give to the local library.  They have a major book sale each year towards the end of September.  I might be able to give away several more boxes of books which will free up needed space.  My books are loosely organized and I'd like to change that.  I want easy access to books and to make a habit of returning books to the library room after I've looked at them.

I live with intermittent voices in my mind and generally feel the presence of them even when they don't speak.  They have moved into a darker place lately and have been trying to hurt me.  I have thought of them as my companions and friends a lot, but lately they have been more detached about sharing information about themselves and more negative about me.  I know that regardless of how they are feeling and expressing themselves that I must take care of myself, make myself the top priority especially when they want to pull me down.  I really value them and the support some of them have given me over the years, but the other ones that are sicker I need to detach from them and wait it out.

I need to appreciate how much they have changed from at times insanely abusive to generally decent and mostly kind.  It is a miracle in my life to have survived the worst of this illness and to have gotten to a place where I feel safe.  Sometimes I wish that they would be removed from my consciousness because all of their problems and issues are a bit of a burden to me.  At the same time, because of my firm belief in a higher power or presence that affects all of us, I know that there is a good reason why I am connected to these voices and that I must be patient with the process of learning and growing.

My life is good.  I feel blessed and grateful for the blessings.  Of course I feel pain and confusion along the way; that is the human condition.  Pema Chodron has called it "the fundamental insecurity of being human."  That insecurity, a sense of not being sure about the direction I'm going in, allows for an opening to the many choices available to me every minute.  I seek guidance from the powers that be several times a day.  I ask for direction and generally I find my way.

The voices have had a mixed reaction to all the art work I've been doing.  They like to toy with my ego either by overestimating my work or underestimating it.  My assessment is the more important one.  I know I have some talent and skill and I know that I have a lot to learn and a lot to study.  After this creative surge I do have to push myself to continue.  I think it is very important that I play as much as possible with the different mediums I have.  It's not good to get too serious.  Art making should be about joy.

Choices For Health Or Sickness

I just listened to the Sex & Love Addicts Anonymous' Inspiration Line (215-574-2120) and someone named Steve talked for about five minutes about the freedom to choose either a return to an addictive lifestyle or to going into recovery.  He chose recovery because he knew that if he didn't he would quite possibly die.  In choosing recovery he had to go through a three month withdrawal period of severe depression.  Gradually he chose to get up in the mornings, eat, brush his teeth, get some rest and get on with life.   The choice for him and many of us was the choice between destructive pain and healing pain.  Healing pain ends after a time.  Destructive pain does not, but rather spirals downward.

I have made many choices in my life, as we all have.  The nature of life is about choices.  The two major categories of choices are the choice to follow health or the choice to follow sickness.  It is the same with our attitudes; we can choose to remain positive or to remain negative.  Over twenty years ago, when I was in a love addicted relationship, I started out following sickness.  I lived in denial and in the delusion that I was "in love."  Over time my delusion about being in love faded and I knew I was caught inside a terrible sickness with my partner.  In desperation I called a couple of domestic violence hotlines when I was alone and eventually made it to an Al-Anon meeting.  I bought the daily readers and began to read them as well as other books on addiction and toxic relationships.  I began to believe that there was still a benevolent force in my life, a Higher Power that I could turn to for guidance and comfort.  I began to pray to be released from a relationship that was spiraling downwards and stifling my spirit and soul.

One day, when I had the opportunity, I left my partner staying with my parents for a couple of months.  I chose myself over my addicted partner.  After having been abused for over five years I was raw and I was angry.  My anger helped me to commit to myself and my parents helped me to work through my process in a safe place.  When I returned home after my partner had left my house, I was still raw, but I was also self protective.  I wrote in a journal.  I got a guitar and began writing and singing songs.  I also made the mistake of remaining isolated.  I didn't reach out to others in recovery from addiction and so I stayed in partial sickness.

Three years later I would enter into a psychotic state.  Choosing myself over my partner had not been enough.  I needed therapy and support groups.  Soon after I became psychotic I was guided by some of the voices in my mind to find a therapist quickly and once again join Al-Anon and another group for domestic violence victims.  For the most part I have continued with therapy till this day.  Me going to support groups has been more uneven because of my perhaps addiction to isolation and doing it on my own.  My choice now is to commit both to therapy and support groups along with taking my medications daily.  It's been a long time coming.  Recently I found out that there are two new Al-Anon meetings in a town close by which is a godsend for me because I need these meetings badly particularly to stay in contact and connection with the people who go to the meetings and want to go more deeply into recovery.

I do believe in the twelve step program for myself.  I do follow.  I am choosing health over sickness day by day.  People have said the program is simple but not easy.  I agree.  It requires rigorous honesty all the time along with self reflection and meditation.  It requires pushing beyond unhealthy comfort zones.  It requires reaching out to others for help as well as helping others.  Each day there is a fresh choice, but I have been conditioning myself to consistently choose health over sickness.  That is how I turn my will and my life over to the care of God.

Surrendering To The Unknown

Paying attention, moment by moment, is surrendering to the unknown.  That surrender is the practice of being open to whatever comes next.  I see being open to whatever comes next from the vantage point of Step 3 of the 12 Steps - "Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood God."  When I stay open, I'm giving the higher power the chance to direct me towards healing where I otherwise might direct myself towards sickness.

God is the Unknown.  Or I should say the Known Unknown because I believe we do "know" God because we know our lives, our emotions, our minds, other lives and this higher power runs throughout all of this.  So what does it mean when you surrender to God?  You allow yourself to be led as if you were blind because truly we are.  Some people see the higher power as a loving parent or parents guiding them as if they were handicapped children.  But there are so many ways to imagine God, to make the Unknown known and familiar.

I don't like feeling blind but I know it is my condition.  I can't see the bigger picture.  I don't really know the larger meaning of my life and other people's lives.  I am very aware of my ignorance and yet this ignorance allows me to stay open and often receptive to what comes along.  It is the state of beginner's mind, the mind of the student just starting to learn about a subject she knows little about.  I feel that way a lot.  That feeling of being small and ignorant grounds me in humility.  Surrendering to something greater, more profound, wiser is practicing humility.  It should be obvious -  me = small, world = large.  But it is not obvious to most of us who get so caught up in our own stories.

We become our whole world with the external world just another extension of ourselves.  It's like living inside a very strong, elastic, nearly impenetrable bubble.  Practicing humility pierces the bubble and lets some of the actual world into awareness immediately giving the individual a much greater perspective, much greater insight.  This insight takes form in a feeling of vulnerability and tenderness which is love.  That's the saving grace of practicing humility - the result is love and love is strong and protective.

When we get humble, we get liberated.  Our humility is an invitation to God to come inside.  My experience with humility is that every time I humble myself, God is right there supporting me, giving me access to a kind of awakened heart and mind which is compassion for my self and others, a respect for life.  The lower you've gone into sickness and hard times, the greater your respect for yourselves and other sufferers when you take the path of recovery from that trauma.  The first Step of the 12 Steps is a call to a very deep humility that comes from living with powerlessness over one's illnesses.  The second Step is an acknowledgement that something in the Unknown is benevolent and wise and can be called upon as we work to heal ourselves.  The third Step is about commitment to this force within the Unknown.

Surrender is not something you do once and it is finished.  Surrender is a continuing process.  It is scary at first.  At key points during the day and night I open and listen and ask "Now what?"  I pray each morning for insight, intuition, inspiration and understanding for the day so that I can make good choices guided by God.  I've learned from my life experience that the main thing God wants us to do is to take care of ourselves, which means absolutely that God wants us to love ourselves deeply at all times.  No one can love you the way you can love you with God's help.  Your relationship with yourself is your primary relationship.  If you don't have a good relationship with yourself, you will encounter problem after problem in your relationship with others.  Self love is the most important bottom line behavior to practice.

When you choose to love yourself, you surrender to God.  Many people look for unconditional love from their partners and become discouraged when this does not happen.  Whenever someone lets them down, they lose faith in the possibility of a greater power being unconditionally loving.  My belief is that God loves unconditionally all life.  It is we, in our sickness, that do not love all life, but continue to choose to be conditional with our love towards not only others but especially towards ourselves.  So where do we start?  We start where we are, with ourselves.  If we need to, we act as if there is an unconditionally loving higher power and we aspire to follow that power by being unconditionally loving towards ourselves as we are and not as we would be.

I think for too many of us unconditionally loving ourselves is entering into the Unknown.  It takes courage and persistence to love yourself no matter what.  I had the wonderful and horrible experience of loving myself despite being attacked by voices that were trying to convince me that I was evil.  I think that I survived that experience because I didn't have as big a burden as some.  I did internalize shame as a child and yet in terms of most of my actions I didn't feel guilty.  I was so withdrawn from people that I didn't give myself a chance to hurt a lot of people.  Not so for more people than not, especially people who have gotten caught in different kinds of addictions.  But the truth as I see it is that I could have been a mass murderer and God would still love me deeply and accept me.  That's what unconditional loving is about.  It's what many mothers and fathers feel about their wayward children.  They love and support their children no matter what, not as enablers, but as a healthy support system connected to others in health.

It is human to be afraid of the Unknown and to want reassurance that all will be well and nothing will be overwhelming.  But the nature of life is to flow like water down into the deep and dark recesses and back up towards the light.  The nature of life is to move and change and hopefully grow in health.  But there is a lot of sickness in us that pulls us down.  Even way down deep or maybe especially way down deep, there are important lessons to learn.  Nothing is wasted.  Our lives are precious and our experience is valuable, but we have to remind ourselves of this on a regular basis.  

Five And A Half Days Quit

Beautiful day out right now.  Late afternoon sun on bare trees, snow on the ground with patches of grass showing through in spots, shadows and light, peaceful, safe, blue sky with a few clouds, the sound of a car passing by on a country road.  Got up to 40 degrees out today.  I went out briefly twice to feed the birds and squirrels and to get the mail, but otherwise indoors.  Was feeling depressed last night and today, sleeping a lot, but I wasn't craving cigarettes.  That's a blessing.  

I need to change my negative way of thinking these last couple of days.  One of my voices reminds me with one word - "Gratitude."  And the voice is right.  Feeling down, hurt, sad, confused then be grateful.  I am grateful that I can breath and walk, grateful that I haven't had a cigarette since Friday night.  I make the list in my prayers nearly every morning and I think how hard it could really be for me with no shelter, no food, with physical and mental ailments.  But I do have shelter and food and heat and clothes and a functioning car and my health is fairly good considering I've been punishing my body with cigarettes for years.  Many blessings.

Compared to most people, I live with a strange orientation within my mind.  I continue to believe that I'm connected to another person's mind, a person who wants no contact with me.  If it were true, it would be a groundbreaking discovery:  telepathy proven in at least two humans via some supernatural force or beings.  But how painful for me that another human being would withhold from me the confirmation of such a truth and let me live day after day in isolation.  And yet, this person has transformed in the last couple of years from a defensive, puerile, sadistic manipulator and liar into a more detached and more balanced, kinder being.  A strange friend.  I would like to meet this person, but without his permission I will not.  

And so I feel depression because of this situation within my mind.  But with a shift of perspective I could find a happier outlook.  Part of me wants the voices to leave and let me be with myself.  It would be easier to start fresh.  But since the voices still remain, I have to push on and keep working at taking care of myself by encouraging myself.  That I am not smoking cigarettes is a big thing.  It shows that I'm willing to come out of the denial of thinking it is okay for me to smoke.  It is not okay and never has been.  I say that I love and respect myself, but I need to show myself that I do by committing each day to not smoke.  

If you are an addict and can acknowledge it to yourself and another person, you know what it feels like to be vulnerable and in need of help.  Getting so sick in addiction and wanting not to die from it, wanting to heal, is that first step towards self care, self love.  Fear is wrapped up in it, but more there is a desire to change towards rebirth in health and not sickness.  And people do get reborn like some kind of phoenix when they practice daily recovery attitudes and behaviors.  Those attitudes and behaviors are nothing really strange to someone who is healthy:  get enough sleep, eat right, get some exercise, take your medications, brush your teeth, bathe, wash your clothes, be honest, be courteous, apologize when you've been hurtful, help others --- but to someone who has a pattern of low self esteem these "normal" healthy things are not so normal to them, but come and go depending on the stress levels of the day.

The psychological aspects of addiction are mental illness.  Addicts are mentally ill, especially when they use and often when they are abstinent, unless they are in a strong recovery program connected to others in recovery.  The 12 Step program is a strong one for those of us who suffer from the mental illness of addiction.  The basic rule of the 12 Steps is love and respect the Higher Power, love and respect yourself and love everyone around you to the best of your ability.  Perhaps loving the Higher Power and others is easier that loving and respecting oneself, but I have found that it is essential to love and respect yourself no matter what you have or haven't done.  One way to show yourself that you love yourself is to stop the addictive behavior.  One day at a time or one moment at a time, don't forsake yourself.  

Working The 10th Step

I've begun the practice of working this Step recently.  I posted in my last blog entry a version of it that I found on the internet, a list of 34 questions to answer before going to sleep.  I'm not yet doing it every night yet have still managed to do it for most of the week these last few weeks.   Ideally, a person should go through the 9 previous Steps to get to this one, but I have not done that yet and think that it is good to review my day and see where I have been getting stuck and where I've been getting freer and more confident.  This can be gratifying in that many of the questions show that I am in recovery fairly strongly, but also frustrating because I see more clearly where I am having difficulty every day I take the inventory and it's the same issues over and over again.

So for a few moments I feel badly about what I didn't do during the day.  Then I realize that those tough problems I need to turn over to God and trust that if I stay open and willing to learn that good changes will come.  But reviewing these problems most nights keeps the work I need to do in my awareness.  The discomfort of that is a part of growth.  I can do nothing unless I am aware of the problem, willing to acknowledge it as a problem, pray on it and let it go till the time comes when I can approach it and diminish it or remove it.

When I take this Step I am holding myself accountable to myself, to God and to other people.  I'm aspiring to be as good a person as I can be on most days of the week.  The most basic way to be a "good" person, a healthy person, is to practice rigorous self honesty.  When I am honest with myself I accomplish a number of things:  I stay aware in the present moment, I make myself vulnerable before the Higher Power allowing that Power to point me in a good direction, I reinforce a sense of personal integrity and responsibility or put more simply, I follow a spiritual path.  Self honesty for me is really the first step.  I can't admit to powerlessness or any of my weaknesses if I can't remain honest.  Honesty is the bottom line practice for me.  When you practice honesty, you can literally feel when dishonesty is creeping into your mind and relations with other people.  That discomfort can stop you cold and help you to return to the healing path.  Honesty safeguards your spiritual health.

Taking the 10th Step you respect yourself by acknowledging just what you did and didn't do that day, assessing what your thoughts and feelings were that day and seeing if you reached out to others to help them as a way to help yourself, too.  It is a self diagnostic test you freely take to build a better relationship with yourself and God and all the people you encounter.  Answering some of the questions will feel real good and others will feel bad.  The bad feelings are meant to raise your awareness level in order to prepare you for change in your life.  Positive change can happen when you learn to feel your feelings.  I have trouble with feeling my feelings, but this Step eases me into it, both the joy and the sadness of being human.

Before you can admit to being wrong in some action towards another, you have to first admit it to yourself, and when you do finally do that you simultaneously admit it to the Higher Power thereby getting the strength to admit the fault openly to the wronged person.  And when you open your mouth and apologize you become strengthened again by taking on responsibility for your actions and that is the core of making an amend.  It is not about being forgiven, though that is always a welcome response, it is about honoring your ability to recognize the truth and speak it regardless of the response.  It takes courage.  It is a discipline of love for self and others.

Inner Child Work

Me at about age seven, drawing.

I've always had a bad memory and, after enduring through an abusive relationship and psychosis, it has gotten worse.  I'm at a point in my life where this is no longer acceptable to me.  I want to remember my life or at least the key elements of it.  The few people I know, those not in a recovery program, pull away from remembering childhood and adolescence and want to leave the past in the past; it's apparently too painful to remember.  But the people in 12 Step recovery programs must face their pasts squarely when the do the 4th Step: Made a searching and fearless moral inventory of ourselves.  Last summer into the Fall, before I had my most recent breakdown, I was working on my 4th Step and managed to partially take my 5th Step, the confession Step.  It didn't feel right and I know it's time to return to the 4th Step and try again.

In order to take this Step I feel I need to remember myself as a kid and so I've been tentatively telling myself to do some "Inner Child" work.  I've returned to two books, John Bradshaw's Homecoming:  Reclaiming and Championing Your Inner Child and Nancy J. Napier's Recreating Your Self:  Help for Adult Children of Dysfunctional Families.  I bought these books in the early 1990s in Florida during one of my extended escapes from my abusive, love and alcohol addicted partner in order to try and reach inside myself and start the healing process.  They both focus on reaching out to the child within and reparenting that child.  I found the Napier book especially important to me.  She teaches her readers how to practice self hypnosis to find one's present self, one's past selves and one's future self.  She has a series of self hypnotic meditations that you read aloud into a recorder complete with appropriate pauses and listen back to in order to enter into a trance state for around 20 minutes a session.

I remember sitting down in a large closet for absolute privacy to record on a tape cassette recorder one of these meditations having to do with regressing to younger parts of one's self.  As I read and paused I got pulled into the trance state and my speech became more childlike as I regressed.  It was a strange feeling and yet I felt I really got to some deep places within myself.  I still have that tape hidden somewhere in the vast clutter of my house.  Recently I have recorded three meditations, one to imagine a particular safe place, one to get in touch with the inner child and one to have myself and my child self meet the future self.  The concept of meeting my future self is a challenging and magical one for me.  I still haven't met her yet, but I'm open to reaching out for whatever my unconscious has to reveal to me about her and the child or children within me.  I say children because there are different age groups within me, different stages of me.  I've met the four year old and the seven year old.

The four year old was sucking her thumb and holding her "thing" which refers to a very soft folded sheet that I would knead with my fingers as I sucked my thumb.  I sucked my thumb until I was seven years old when my mother threw away my "thing" mainly because my two front teeth were starting to buck and twist.  Besides that I was about three years too old to be still doing that.  The reasons why I did that are unclear to me right now, but I'd like to find out.  The little Katy stood on a path through a wooded area leading to a beach looking at me from about ten feet away.  She wore a short dress and her hair was pretty short, too. She was serious, but open, just there and watching me.  Later I would take her hand.

The seven year old, no longer sucking her thumb, was also serious, but no longer as accepting.  There was caution in her.  She wore shorts and a sleeveless shirt, her hair medium length and uncombed looking - she was very slim and very tan.  It was summer for her.  She stood close to a tree in the shade and watched me without speaking.  Her eyes were dark, large and soulful, nose small and round, and lips full but stopping short of a pout.  I could feel that she was bright, but wounded.  Damped down.  I just stood at a distance from her, not close enough to touch her.

I'm not ready to meet the future self because I don't even know these parts of myself well enough.  I've only done the trance work a few times so far, but wouldn't mind starting a practice where I do it once a day for around twenty to forty minutes.  Ms. Napier says it is important to go slowly and move with the changes.  She encourages changing the meditation to suit what the unconscious is directing you to look at and experience.  I'm somewhat nervous about doing this, but I think it's because it's a new and unfamiliar practice.

Of course, emotions will rise to the surface and I will have to work with the uncomfortable ones.  The future self is supposed to come forward to help with this, to begin the process of reparenting the sick children within.  I know I need this self therapy.  I have a new therapist and I will ask her to help me when I get stuck.  I think it's important that I have someone to talk to about the trance work, an outside view that might give me more clarity and direction than I can give to myself.  I need to work towards overall balance especially when I'm tipping into negative feelings and thoughts.  But really, the visions that come up are set in places of strong safety, for me, at or near the beach, my favorite childhood place.  This makes it safe to approach the dysfunction in myself that I acquired through living in a dysfunctional family system.

It disturbs me not only how out of touch I am with my childhood and youth, but how out of touch so many adults seem to be.  I haven't met anyone who hasn't been hurt as a child and adolescent, some severely so, and yet for all of us childhood and youth had many magical moments seen through fresh eyes with an open spirit.  The problem with the really bad stuff is that we let it stand out and color many of our memories and also our present moments.  Why do we have this tendency to forget so much of the goodness we encountered?  And why do we generate the one thing that we really want to disperse:  suffering, through holding onto resentment and regret or worse, hurting ourselves, as I have done much of my life, with a numb detachment?

I want resolution to all my unresolved conflicts.  Don't we all?  Isn't that why many people pick up all kinds of self-help books, go to therapy and support groups, reach out to family members, friends and lovers?  Those that get that far are luckier than the ones who wish to bury the conflicts to make them somehow disappear.  But they don't disappear.  They come up in disguised forms whenever we find ourselves conflicted with people and situations.  So I'm here to urge you to find your safe place or places inside yourself and take the risk of getting to know your beginnings, your core wounded self, in order to release a more profound self, what some therapists call the "true self".  What Buddhists might call the Buddha child within which is our unblemished true nature that sprang into life in even the most miserable childhoods.  It's always there, ready to be tapped into, but you have to commit to it and do the work.

We Are Animals On A Planet We Call Earth

Part of why we are in denial about being a mentally ill, addicted species is that we are in denial about being animals.  Animals are to be domesticated or killed and eaten, or killed for sport or to be kept as pets.  Wild animals are to be looked at from a distance either because they are easily frightened or potentially dangerous.  Yet we seem to have amnesia over the fact that we are animals in the animal kingdom.  We seem to place ourselves somewhere between animals and angels or at the very least we say we are "higher" animals somehow greater than "lesser" animals.  And yet collectively we behave so much worse than mere animals because we have become unnatural.  And in our unnaturalness we have embraced as a species evil intent and evil actions.  We could feed all the hungry humans on the planet.  We could put an end to war.  We could house the homeless.  We could end the cycle of child abuse.  We could turn from the various cycles of addiction towards recovery.  We could become united instead of divided.  But we do not.

Most people do not want to acknowledge that we are out of touch with reality.  Our reality is contained within the natural world.  The soil and rock and water and air, the valleys and hills and mountains and oceans, the plants and trees and fish and birds and insects and animals are our basic reality.  Our bodies remind us daily and nightly that we are part of nature.  We must breath and eat and drink and defecate and urinate and sleep and find shelter just like any other animal.  But our more complex brains that have allowed us to create more complex environments and interrelationships are why we have become so unnatural as a species.  The basic instincts of fear, anger and sex are all out of balance, all over emphasized.  We overemphasize basic instincts and underemphasize the necessity of conditioning ourselves towards thoughtful responsiveness.  

I think the goal for our species should be to become enlightened mammals, but for many we have become addicted mammals who because of addiction behave deviantly.  Our deviancy shows itself in overpopulation, extreme pollution, rape of natural resources, the spread of diseases, poverty and war. There is only one way out of this world predicament and that is through raising awareness levels.  Without awareness, living habitual and addicted lifestyles, there is no way to change.  Those that are aware that we are addicts living in an addictive world, those that are in recovery from their addictions need to step up and talk or write about their experiences.  Engaging in our addictions is what divides us, but acknowledging ourselves as addicts and embracing recovery is what can unite us as animals on a planet we call Earth.

The Third Step

3.  Made a decision to turn our will and our lives over to the care of God as we understood Him.

The God of my understanding is a God of Love; within Love there is balance, health, wisdom and compassion.  What Buddhists call “Buddha Nature”, which is seen as the core of everyone of us, is God.  I see God everywhere, in everything, especially in our hearts and minds, which when combined seem to form our spirit.  From this perspective we never have been, nor ever will be, disconnected from this Higher Power.  And yet so many of us walk around feeling as is we are separate, not only from others, but from God.  I’ve felt this way too when I was young and especially when I was in a co-addicted relationship where I unconsciously turned my will over to my human partner, not yet having had a clear conception of God in my life till then.  But falling quickly to one of my bottoms within that addicted relationship taught me more in five and a half years than my whole previous life.  My partner, who suffered greatly both before I had met him and with me, was my greatest teacher.  He taught me sweet lessons and he taught me horribly painful lessons, but I realized that that was just the Higher Power working through him, not letting anything go to waste for either of us.  It was up to us to learn the lessons and move forward towards health and balance.

I did so gradually wandering a meandering path up and down still not knowing how to direct myself towards a good and useful life.  When I wandered away from the path, away from the Higher Power, by forgetting the great lesson I was given about admitting that I was spiritually and mentally ill and that I needed to reach out to other recovering people, I was brought, I believe with a most deliberate intention, into several years of acute psychosis.  Over three years time, I hit bottom three times.  The problem and the pain were no longer outside of me in an addicted relationship with an abusive young man, but within my mind itself.  I was given the opportunity to experience the nature of delusions and paranoia.  From the very first moment that this psychic mental illness descended upon me in my already sick, self hating state, there was the strong presence of God there.  When I was most desolate, I never felt abandoned.  It was early in my psychosis that I turned my will over to God.  I know I was thoroughly prepared years before I became acutely ill to endure the hellish times and to place God above every person in the world by practicing peace towards others, towards the voices in my mind, towards myself.

It’s been sixteen years that I have been turning my will over to God during adverse circumstances and good ones equally.  In the beginning it was excruciating and off and on I wanted to die, but the very clear answer I got when I called out to God was - it was not allowed; I had to stay and continue which was the biggest test of my faith I’d ever had.  But in my mind to reject my faith in the absolute goodness of the Higher Power was to be pulled deeper and deeper into the horror of insanity.  And I struggled with having faith when I tried to do what I thought God wanted and still was in so much pain.  But the alternative was so much worse and on a very basic level the sickness within me did not make sense to me, it was illogical, perverse, distorting basic truths.  I was already in love with seeking the Truth since I was a teenager.  My main motivation for continuing to live was that I just wanted to understand the Truth regardless of whether it worked in my favor or not.  I wanted to know because I already knew that revealing the Truth brought God in my presence too and when God was there so strongly I felt myself being healed.

I am in a very good place in my life right now because I am improving my conscious contact with this Higher Power.  I turn my will over every day and ask for guidance throughout the day to be given the clues and intuition to be of service in whatever way this great force, this Great Mystery, decides for me.  As best I can, I go with the flow of the goodness I find all around me.  This is not a painless process.  Following God’s will is not about removing pain and there are times when I absolutely must just sit with the pain and wait.  But now, as compared to before, the pain is mostly minimal and I feel and express a lot of joy in living.

Faith: The Bigger Picture

The truth cannot be contained within a scientific theory, though many people take comfort in the belief that it can.  Then again, many people also take comfort in a belief in faith which demands no tangible proofs.  I place myself somewhere in the middle, or perhaps I should say that some scientific facts form the groundwork for an exploration beyond the facts.  The material world and the spiritual world are not divorced in my world view.

It is human nature to struggle with not knowing.  The biggest struggle we face is coming to terms with our own mortality.  We commonly accept that we will die, but we don’t know when and often don’t know how.  The danger in being alive is that there is always the chance of physical injury or illness or, worse, death itself.  If we walk through our lives preoccupied with this shadow, we rob ourselves of the joys contained within life.  And so, even the most committed atheist, who relies heavily on the truth in facts, must walk out the door carrying inside himself, or herself, a degree of faith.

What can we do in this place of not knowing, this place of faith where we suspend the knowledge that we will die and place in its stead the belief that we will continue to live?  We commit to living moment by moment, day after day.  I think all of us, without exception, put our faith in something larger than ourselves be it the world we live in and our encounters with other people and places and experiences or a faith in some kind of higher power watching over us and guiding us through all our encounters.  We do not exist only for ourselves, but in relation to the world outside our physical bodies.  Even at our earliest physical beginnings, we were in a relationship with our mothers.  We have never been in isolation.

The biggest mystery is not death, the supposed end point of existence, that implacable, unknowable experience.  The mystery is within our spirits, that is our everyday lives and process of living.  We live without a memory of our conception or our birth and so we don’t really know where we come from. We don’t understand the fundamental elements of how or why we came into being on this planet. We’ve learned some facts about the means of sexual reproduction for human animals, but the facts leave out so much and can’t reveal the precise moment we began to exists as a life force.

What does it mean to exist as a life force?  It is more than just blood being pumped by our heart into our organs, animating ourselves to continue breath by breath.  Our life force is contained within our awareness.  So much of our bodily functions are involuntary and accomplished without awareness, our hearts pumping, our breath in and out, the digestion of the food we eat.  It’s as if our bodies are on automatic pilot thereby allowing us either to rest in, or be restless within, our consciousness.  Our consciousness is greater than our bodies and has more in common with the space around us, the intangible, the vast, something with nothing to hold onto.

And so, with so much freedom we get frightened by the power of all the choices we can make and do make, with the present and potential consequences of our actions.  Beyond our instinct for self-preservation, the fight or flight reaction to negative stimuli, we have the ability to rise above our reactions by learning to pause and reflect, to take stock of our present lives and our pasts.  We rely heavily on memory, but because we all have lived such rich lives with so many moments, so many thoughts and feelings, only some memories get recorded.  There is a process of selection or editing out the parts of our lives that are not essential to our underlying spirit, the thing that motivates us to keep on going.  Our experience is too vast for us to be in conscious control of just what we remember and what we don’t remember.

This leads us back to the mystery of our spirits.  What is this unconscious self that selects what to store and what to release into the flow of our ever flowing lives?  I truly do not believe that our selections are haphazard, but how do we know what is essential to know, and remember, when we proceed so often not knowing the deeper nature of our thought processes.  Something within us does know that our lives have this greater meaning, even when we are so very doubtful about ourselves.  This inner self is not so easily explained away by scientists and psychologists.  We can talk about the effects of neurotransmitters and label our psyches as divided into superego, ego and id, but we truly do not know the origins of this mystery.

This mystery leads us right back to faith and to sitting with a sometimes uncomfortable mixture of knowing and not knowing.  People are deluded when they affirm that they do not have faith.  Whenever we take something for granted we have faith, faith in our lives, faith that the sun will rise the next day, faith that the world is turning.  Whenever we reach out for a greater understanding of our lives and the meaning within it, we have faith.  Faith allows us to open up instead of shut down.  Those people caught within severe depression struggle desperately with a lack of faith and so they shut down and they shut down some more until they are cornered within their minds and left unbalanced, left hurting so badly that they turn to various escapes, including suicide.

What do they or any of us have left to work with?  Our awareness which is greater than our minds. You can sit somewhere in silence with no thoughts and be so very aware of all the details of your environment, be very much alive because of your awareness.  When you sit with your awareness you can feel the life force all around you.  The beautiful simplicity of our awareness often is contrasted with the misdirected complexity of our thoughts.  Thoughts can point the way to underlying truths, but they can just as easily direct us into accepting lies.  The fact is we learn through misunderstanding except when we persist in cherishing falseness.  Some people cherish falseness because they are, as yet, ignorant and other people cherish falseness as a means of disguising themselves and/or taking advantage of other people and situations.

All of us have lied consciously to others and unconsciously to ourselves.  We are probably the only potentially insincere species on this planet.  We are not always what we seem.  Because we have this great power to deceive and manipulate, we rely heavily on our false thoughts to motivate us to continue in the deceptions.  We play a serious game with our lives and others' lives.   The problem with believing in lies and lying is that it produces delusional thinking within individuals and worse, the acceptance of illusion over reality for the general populace.

When delusional thinking takes hold within people and spreads into a collective of people, true awareness becomes obscured.  Prejudices and lies partially color every culture on the globe.  And so conflict is born over and over again and a seemingly unending need to inevitably find scape goats.  It is an illusion that we can find justice through blaming and condemning others.  Justice can only be found through an unprejudiced awareness using thoughts to seek out truth rather than using thoughts to hide the truth or only partially convey the greater truth.  Good intentions towards all beings really does count, just as negative intentions really do distort reality and cause great harm to harmless beings.

In order cultivate good intentions towards everyone, you have to get very, very honest.  Those hardest hit by distorted thinking and compulsive actions are addicts.  Addicts move into recovery when they acknowledge that their intentions towards themselves and others are not good intentions, but rather self-serving and self-destructive.  If they can get honest about that and if they can hold onto that realization, they can begin the recovery process of deconstructing the lies that they’ve been living under for so long.  As the distortions in their thought processes begin to clear up, they naturally find that their intentions towards themselves and others returns to health.  Health reinforces the positive and the positive is non harming.

I know some addicts struggle with 12 step programs because so much of the program asks each individual to either reach for a belief in a higher power or deepen the faith they already have.  Faith demands surrender and surrender for many of us is a scary concept and a scarier practice.  Faith also requires that you believe in the essential goodness in life and in everyone.  Faith allows room for a bigger picture to emerge, one greater than our individual stories.  As I said earlier, I believe we all have faith to a greater or lesser extent; it’s how we get through our days and nights when things get rough. As we rely on it, we also take it for granted.  The gift of facing one’s addiction is that one stops taking faith for granted.  Faith becomes a rich and rewarding way of approaching life with openness, honesty and dignity.  I have found in my practice that when I have faith in others higher self and tell them so, that they relax, open, and in return have faith in me too.  A supportive bond gets created, the basis rests in trust and trust allows people to live together in harmony while facing the continuing challenges of daily life.

The Benefits Of Buddhist Practice

I just wanted to thank Chris, Ashley, Karen and Pam for leaving some great comments to my last blog entry about Pema Chodron.  These are all women who have experience with mental illness and yet each in different ways are deep into recovery.  They are smart, creative, talented and perceptive people and they have come a long way and have a lot to offer the world.  I respect and admire each and every one of them and am honored that they took the time to read my entry and comment.

I would like in this entry to address some of Chris' comment.  She wrote that while she responds to several of Pema Chodron's books, she can't commit to being a Buddhist or following Buddhist principles mainly because she believes that Buddhism shares with other organized religions the imperative to follow without questioning.  She also wonders whether it is appropriate to pick and choose what to believe while leaving the rest behind, which is an approach that I have supported in previous blog entries.

First of all, I have to say that while I am strongly influenced by Buddhist principles and have applied many to my life, I do not consider myself a Buddhist.  I did not grown up living with any form of organized religion and was taught to be suspicious of religions in general.  I turned towards Buddhism in my thirties, after having survived an abusive relationship but before I became actively ill with schizophrenia, because I had begun practicing yoga and meditation and I was curious.  The Vietnamese monk, Thich Nhat Hanh, was my main teacher via audio programs.  He introduced me to the practice of mindfulness.

There is no dogma in the practice of mindfulness.  It's all about focusing your attention on what you are doing in the present moment and really staying aware.  Thich Nhat Hanh gave examples of mindfully eating and mindfully washing the dishes and said that one could apply mindfulness to everything.  And what was the point of doing this practice?  For me, as I practiced, the point was to really appreciate my life.  When I was mindful, and mindfulness lends itself to a kind of heightened perception, I was not lost thinking of the past or planning for and worrying about the future.  There is a great freedom contained in the practice of mindfulness, freedom and common sense.  I found it to be both enlightening and healing to my spirit and so I touched base with Buddhist practices just before my breakdown and then during it and beyond.

The Buddhist teachers that I went on to encounter in books and audiobooks over the years did not browbeat their readers and listeners into swallowing what they were teaching without questioning.  Instead they offered up a variety of practices and invited their audience to test these practices out in their own lives.  Pema Chodron has often said that she provides hints and clues about applying the practices, but that the ultimate test has to be done by each of us alone.  It was the Buddha himself who said that people should not blindly follow what he was teaching, but should test it out.

One of the reasons why I'm so enthusiastic about writing about Buddhist practice is because I have tested some of it out and found it to be, without a doubt, beneficial to myself.  The basic principles and practices encourage open mindedness, acceptance, tolerance, patience, generosity and love towards oneself and all others.  Being a pacifist, this loving philosophy gives me a lot of support to continue being a pacifist.  It also gives me hope that a lot of other people are turning towards the philosophy of peace in the world simply by applying these Buddhist practices to their lives.  When you embrace mindfulness, you embrace self responsibility and responsibility towards others, be they friend, stranger or foe. Mindfulness is about gently becoming more and more aware, more awake.  Too many of us are on automatic pilot, going through our busy lives without stopping to reflect and appreciate ourselves and life.

My purpose in writing about Buddhism is not to get readers to become Buddhists, but rather, to encourage them apply some of the Buddhist practices and attitudes to their lives.  The practices of mindfulness and sending lovingkindness prayers out to self and others alone are enough to benefit individuals and ultimately communities as well, if enough people turn their wills towards being aware and non harming.  What I'm proposing, along with most Buddhist teachers, is a gentle, gradual shift in awareness towards love, not just for self and loved ones, but as a basis for relating to people and life in general.  But in order to shift into love as a basis for relating to all people, individuals must have at least one or two spiritual practices to follow and guide them.  These do not have to be Buddhist practices, but I have discovered that Buddhism is rich in various practices and is quite accessible.

Chris questioned in her comment whether it was okay to pick and choose what to practice and what to ignore from either one religion or various religions.  I still believe that it is perfectly okay.  The point is to do what works for you and that could mean that you adhere to only one religion and follow it in an orthodox manner.  Whether you are orthodox or not, you are nonetheless on your own path.  You can choose no religion at all and be on a spiritual path.  I think we are all on the path whether we can consciously acknowledge it or not.  This is because we are beings that gravitate towards love, love of other people and love of all kinds of activities, with and without people.  It's the ones who turn towards anger and criticism, perhaps because of having been abused earlier, who are hurting the most, along with the ones who have moved from having been abused into the role of the abuser.

Even people who have been severely abused as children have experienced times of love and acceptance, if not from within their families, then from outside of them.  I think we are all born with the instinct to recognize the deep value of giving and receiving love.  So many of us lose sight of this when we've been hurt by people and life circumstances.  I know my heart went into a deep freeze and stayed frozen even after I left the abusive situation I had been living in.  It took a severe form of mental illness to wake me up to the absolute necessity of valuing myself and others daily.  The method of waking me up was harsh and painful, yet at the same time the lessons I was learning were branded in my heart and, over a decade later, I am still practicing what I learned then:  to be of benefit to myself and others.  The aim of Buddhist practice is the same, which is why I have been able to embrace it, apply it and share it.

A Tribute To Pema Chodron

 

I painted this portrait about two years ago and I have hung it in my living room where I can see it often.  It was such a pleasure to capture a likeness of this woman who I think is a wonderful person and teacher.  I look up to her as an example of the best that the human species has to offer, a person of integrity willing to go the distance to promote peace and healing here on this troubled planet.  

Pema Chodron was born in July of 1936 in my hometown, New York City.  She celebrated her 76th birthday this past summer.  She became a Buddhist nun in 1974 after having been an elementary school teacher in New Mexico and California and after having given birth to two children.  When she decided to become a nun she was still young enough to be open to the Buddhist teachings and teachers (especially her root teacher Chogyam Trungpa), but old enough to have a lot of life experience with being a wife, mother and teacher.  These skills served her well as she moved from being a dedicated Buddhist student to being a Buddhist teacher in her own right. 

I discovered Pema Chodron at a crucial point in my life, only a couple of months after my last psychotic break eleven years ago.  I had only just decided to commit to taking the anti-psychotic medications; I mark my entry into recovery from severe mental illness from that point on.  I bought a six audiotape program by Pema Chodron called Awakening Compassion:  Meditation Practices For Difficult Times.  I responded right away to her down to earth style, her intelligence and humor and honesty.  I confess that I chose her audio program not only because she was teaching about Buddhism, which I had been interested in since before I became ill, but because she was an American woman.  I needed a female role model to teach me, a mentally ill, middle aged woman, how to follow a spiritual practice that would help guide me through my symptoms and, at the same time, deepen my connection to the people I encountered in my life.  She offered me a way to begin and several practices to follow in my day to day existence.  

I began to collect other audio programs as well as books by Pema Chodron.  During the early stages of my recovery her voice and words and the Buddhist teachings she taught on were like a lighthouse beacon when I began to get lost.  She radiated both common sense and a wholesome goodness and I came to trust her overall guidance.  I live in a rather isolated place that has an almost entirely Christian population with little access to Buddhist teachers or community.  And so I came to rely on books, audiobooks and some information and community on the internet.  More than half of my studies were devoted to Pema Chodron, but I also studied such teachers as Thich Nhat Hanh, Alan Watts, Sharon Salzberg, Jack Kornfield, Ram Dass, Chogyam Trungpa and Robert Thurman.  I read and listened, took notes and meditated, but more than that I took what I was learning to heart and began applying it to my life.  

I thought about the value of patience as I sat waiting for my brother to finish shopping so that we could get home before dark.  I thought about the value of generosity and the deep bonds it creates in friendships as I offered the use of my car to a new friend who could neither afford to repair her vehicle or to pay for the monthly insurance.  I thought about the value of honesty as I continued to write and talk to myself in my audio journal, passing on what I'd learned to the people who read this blog and to the people in my life.  I especially took the Tibetan Buddhist mind training slogans "Always maintain only a joyful mind" and "Be grateful to everyone" to heart.  

In the moments when my spirits flagged and I was heading towards a depressed kind of circular thinking, I would pause and remember to be joyful.  Just saying aloud "Always maintain only a joyful mind" made me smile with relief.  It was as if I had just given myself permission to be happy, to be content with the advantages and limitations of my situation, of my life.  I have a refrigerator magnet that says "Count your blessings" and when I aimed to be joyful that's what I did.  I found joy in my easy breathing, in all the space around me, in the shelter of my home and the light that came in through the windows.  Joy in the ability to move, in my senses, in the ticking of the clock, in the fond attention of my cats.  I took and continue to take much comfort and guidance from the basic goodness of the stuff of existence.  Amidst all that goodness I also felt my own essential goodness as both a witness of life and a participant in it. 

What Pema Chodron has done for me is to help me believe in Buddha Nature or the essential goodness in everything inanimate and alive.  I think I spent much of my youth and adulthood in the shadow of the concept of original sin even though I wasn't raised with Judeo-Christian religion at home.  By the time my parents got married they were ex-Catholics and had rejected the concept of God or a higher power, but shame and guilt had unfortunately been instilled in them early on.  I think I followed my mother when I began to believe that there was something wrong with me and along with that shame came a sense of guilt, too.  I had too much and I didn't feel as if I had earned it and I thought that there was something wrong with not just me, but with my family.  

Pema Chodron has said on many occasions that self-denigration is one of the biggest obstacles to acquiring wisdom, that and always blaming others while ignoring our own faults.  And so we swing from two poles, seeing ourselves as either less than or more than others when in truth we are all on the same playing field or, as Pema likes to say, in the same boat.  Much of my suffering came from believing that I was different and less qualified than other people.  Because I believed this I cultivated a tendency to pull into myself and by the time I had my first nervous breakdown that pattern was deeply entrenched.  It was my mysterious voices that alternately helped and tormented me into reaching out to help others in a community with very little mental health resources.  To my surprise, I found that in helping others, they helped me to cut through my isolation and they gave me a warm place to occupy and some purpose.  I was an odd mixture of both insanity and sanity, at times succumbing to the force of my delusions and other times keeping them hidden from others.  

Before I moved away from New York City, I shamed myself; afterwards I began a relationship with someone who took my sense of shame and amplified it into a potent mixture of shame and resentment.  Those two negative emotions would eventually grow into an outbreak of schizophrenia.  When the voices overtook my life they quite plainly forced me to be useful in a way that I had not ever been before.  They turned me upside down and there was much pain and suffering, but part of it was because I held on to the sickness that I had oddly nurtured over the years.  Through Pema Chodron's wise guidance I began to see, after years of struggle, that encountering and overcoming obstacles is a spiritual path in itself and that many people are on that path; it is not just me alone. 

My self imposed isolation is on the wane.  I will always need a lot of time alone being creative in one way or another, but my heart has thawed out and I am including other people in my life.  I realize now what I didn't believe before, that we are all interconnected in a magical web and that I've always belonged here.  Pema Chodron has been for me the best of guides through the twists and turns of my mental illness always pointing out possible healthy paths to take.  Pema Chodron's message is the same as Jesus' message and Buddha's message: Practice lovingkindness towards yourself and spread it out towards all others.  Call it what you will, love, compassion, tolerance, generosity, gentleness, patience -- all of it is the basis for spiritual practice for any living person and a collective spiritual practice of love, preferably at all times, is the only available key to finally change the face of humanity individual by individual.  I am not enlightened, but I think I am on the mend because I am more awake to the profound meaning behind Buddha Nature.  Thank you Ani Pema.  

Our World Still Turns

The world did not end yesterday; we have been given a reprieve.  How shall we spend it, in denial or in action?  With global climate change, near economic ruin, continuing wars, people (children!) starving and persisting diseases, it is not too far fetched to consider that our world is dying and mainly because of us and our chosen lifestyles.  In these challenging times, some claim that they have woken up into an enlightened consciousness and way of being.  Eckhart Tolle, who wrote a very popular book called The Power Of Now, in 1999, is one of that group.

I have read over half of the book.  I connect with some of it; that connection might be because a part of me really wishes that people as individuals are having a positive change of consciousness that will direct them away from business as usual on this planet.  I believe our survival depends upon it.  But at the same time that I welcome Mr. Tolle's assertions that enlightenment is accessible in every passing moment, I feel wary of anyone who achieves fame and monetary success through such assertions.  I believe that such success can overemphasize the importance of one person over others and can lead to a kind of corruption of spirit and message.

And so, as they say in 12 step groups, I will take what I need and leave the rest, which is what I hope all of us do.  It does no good to totally accept or reject one person's ideas.  No one can live our lives for us, nor learn our lessons; we have to do this ourselves now and always.  What I take from Mr. Tolle is what I have taken from other spiritual teachers and that is that it is not the past or the future that matters so much as being aware, and therefore awake, in the present.  It sounds so simple and, if you are willing to stop and look about you, it really is simple, but so often we go about in a dream of non mindful doing caught in the trap of questionable thinking.

Mindful action and the ability to watch our thoughts, respect them, but not necessarily engage in them, I believe is what Eckhart Tolle would describe as a "portal" to a higher consciousness.  This consciousness would be one that would be beneficial to ourselves, towards others and towards this planet.  The more people that tap into practicing mindfulness, the greater our chances of making deeply beneficial changes in the short run and the long run.  It takes courage to remain open enough to be mindful.  Mindful people are not aggressive, greedy and because they let themselves be aware, they give themselves the chance to act responsibly, instead of reacting thoughtlessly and self-centeredly.

For everyone, self honesty needs to be the basis of the changes that must come.  We don't have the time to remain in denial.  If you can't sit with the truth at some point during your day, each day, you will remain unconscious and ineffective; perhaps you will contribute to the problems of the day rather than to the solutions.  My feeling is we need to pull together and the courage it takes to be honest does create the strong bonds necessary for us to do this.  Surely there are enough of us to change the world.  In the 1950s there were 3 billion people on earth -- now there are over 7 billion people.  We cannot go on indiscriminately procreating, acting as if we have the right to do as we please.

We have thoroughly tested out hatred through wars as a basis for supposedly civilized life, laying claim to imaginary, man made territories and rights.  It is my very strong belief that now is the time to embrace peace on earth.  What good can really be done without it?  The only way I see this being possible is if more people than not stand up individually and refuse to service and sacrifice themselves to the war machine concocted by various "nations".  It is simple:  if we refuse to fight, there can be no war, even drones need to be made, serviced and sent out by people.  The phrase "Just Say No" did not work on the "war on drugs" but it would work if people abandoned the military and put their energies towards saving this planet and the people and life on it.

Do you love this world with its oceans, mountains, plains, valleys, deserts, rivers, forests and streams?  Do you love the life that grows and moves across this earth?  Can you rise up to the challenge of loving those who it would be easier to hate?  Can you cross cultural barriers and rejoice in the wonderful diversity of all of us human animals?  Can you chip in and do your part for the love of it?  I, for one, have a lot of faith that you can.  Despite all the mistakes we've made, our essential spirits are solidly good.  I believe in the power of love to conquer hate and the power of love to move mountains if need be.  And I'm afraid it is needed, probably more now than at any time in our relatively brief history.  We need a global change of consciousness.  We need it now, in all of our present moments.

Post Thanksgiving Reflections

Thanksgiving went really well this year.  My brother gave it a B+.  We did our Thanksgiving shopping about a week ago, then I cleaned and organized the house and then at 7:30 am on Thanksgiving day I drove to my brother's house, just a couple of miles away, and picked him up.  Neither of us had gotten much sleep and yet we did get the work done.  So Rob put the turkey in the oven soon after he got to my house.  Our guests arrived soon after 3pm and they were my new, good friend Sam and her older sister and her sister's husband and one other friend.  My brother made sure to buy a big turkey, 28 pounds, so that everyone could take home leftovers.  Everyone was having such a great time that they stayed till after 11pm.  I was particularly happy to finally get to meet Sam's sister Anne.

Sam and her sister are very close and always have been.  Anne is four years older than Sam and before Sam was born Anne, at a mere three years of age, petitioned her mother to give her a little sister.  Luckily for Anne (and Sam) that's just what happened.  Even at such a young age, Anne's maternal instincts were strong and she became a second mother to Sam.  Sam was very bright as a little kid and she was always ahead of the rest of her class by a few years because Anne would teach her what she had learned in school.  And then they both had three older brothers that I'm sure they learned things from.  They lived in a big, old yellow house with a wrap around porch in town.  Their father was a professor at the university here and their mother had her hands full raising five children.

During dinner Anne sat down next to me and we began to talk.  There was something gentle, sweet yet also strong and very honest about her.  She had lovely large eyes and long, gray hair and she wore a pair of earrings that she had made out of colored clay.  The only rather minor problem for me was that she spoke softly and amidst the noise of the others talking and the background music, I lost some of what she was saying to me.  But not all, in fact mostly I understood her.  We talked for quite a while with me trying to be extra attentive and responsive to the things she was saying.  She told me some things in confidence about herself and I felt warmed by her quick trust in me.  I was under the mistaken impression that Anne would look and act like an older version of Sam, but this was not the case.  Anne was more feminine than Sam and it was obvious that Anne believed that Sam was smarter than herself and that might be true and yet Anne showed fortitude, caring and competence in getting her nursing degree and working as a nurse before she retired.  Now she is a serious craftsman and has her own studio space to work in.  She also has a devoted husband, who is a gentle person, too.

Amongst the five of us, except Anne's husband who was abstaining from alcohol, we drank four bottles of red wine.  The dinner, prepared carefully by my brother, was excellent and we had a great time.  Considering that I had gotten only a couple of hours of sleep the night before, I was in excellent shape. Pretty much all of my delusional thinking of the previous days evaporated when I set out to accomplish something and interact with others.  Though I did start cleaning only the night before, I found that my house was not in such bad shape and I could do the work without stressing out about it.  This is a positive change for me.  I still struggle with getting the cleaning done, but no where near as much as before.  I think that's because Sam visits with me for a few hours every week or so and this motivates me to clean and organize.  Really on many levels having Sam in my life has been a godsend that has finally broken through the isolation that I imposed upon myself for a long time, even after I had been in recovery for years.

Another positive change for me this year was that I was able to be social.  Last year for Thanksgiving we had only one guest, so that it was very mellow, but the year before I freaked out and stayed downstairs away from the party all afternoon missing out on dinner with everyone.  This year was different perhaps in a large part due to the presence of women in the group.  The other years it was just men and because I had been in an abusive relationship with a man years before, I still felt self-conscious and intimidated when left on my own.  This year I had emotional backup because Anne and Sam paid attention to me and we very naturally supported each other.  But it was more than that, it was something inside of me; I felt some confidence that within this small group of people I would be accepted.  I didn't feel weird and out of place.  That was particularly gratifying to feel in my own house acting as hostess.

And yet less than a week earlier I was getting pulled into delusional reveries about my supposed connection to some totally unapproachable famous man.  I think the reason I have come mostly out of those delusional thoughts is because I've been working on my psyche to do just that -- let go and redirect myself.  My obligation to host the Thanksgiving dinner gave me a ready opportunity to take my thoughts from the unreal and unknown to the real and known, to the here and now.  Plus, I actually care about a wider circle of people now and I wanted to make this a nice holiday for the few of them that came last Thursday.  I know my brother and I succeeded in that.  He worked on the dinner and I worked on my house and my mind.

I don't know if my mental sobriety will last, but I have learned that keeping various projects going helped me to stay focused on my small life.  Before Thanksgiving I was still creating songs, working on  reading my journals and collecting quotes to make into a book, and taking at least a day a week to focus on writing blog entries.  Last week I set up my portastudio in one of my back rooms which is something I have been wanting to do for at least a month.  Yesterday evening I ordered three real inexpensive instruments, a djembe drum, a mandolin and a ukelele.  I already have an electric and an acoustic guitar and Sam's acoustic guitar and her bass guitar.  I love the idea of collecting instruments and learning new ones.  I'm a bit stuck with my guitar.  I tend to go around in circles that I have trouble breaking out of.  I'm hoping that a new infusion of instruments that I have never touched, let alone tried to play, will spark my curiosity and get me to fool around and practice and really learn.  So I've decided that this winter I'm going to work on creating/practicing/recording songs from the last six years to make into another CD of my more recent work.  That's another thing I've been wanting to do for a long, long time.

I've had my journal book idea for many years, but was never quite strong enough to read my journals for an extended period of time and actually select entries based on certain themes.  Now I've decided that I want one of the themes to be my desire to follow a spiritual path which began around the time I went to the Al-Anon support groups just about 20 years ago.  This is a theme that definitely pops up in most, if not all, of my existing journals.  Just possibly, I can create a collection of excerpts around this theme dividing them up into sections following the stages of my adult life and prefacing each section with an informative and reflective essay.  I have a curious feeling that I might be able to do this.  I've already got most of the material.  It's a matter of selecting and editing it down and organizing it, living with it for a while in its nakedness, dividing it up and writing up responses to each section.  So that is another serious project I want to work on this winter into spring.

This blog, of course, is important to me.  My music and my journal book are for now my private space where I can work, but this blog is for public viewing and public sharing.  It's an open journal of my process and progress over time.  It's where I keep in touch with my Buddhist practice and reflect upon what I've been learning.  It's where I can write about my mental illnesses and others mental illness discovering strategies along the way for how to cultivate more mental health in all of our lives.  It's a place where I can test out my commitment to being an honest and giving person.  I guess I'm hoping to set a good example here for maybe a few to follow, that it is a good thing to share your story in an open, honest way.  Some people, maybe many people, feel that openness is good with close friends and family or support groups, but that otherwise it is best not to admit to too much.  I've found, at least on this blog, that I need to share my perspective.  It's my way of contributing to the world around me.  It's all the more important to come across as thoughtful and articulate because I live with mental illness and I think communication is the main way to fight stigmatization.  I think stigma has more to do with ignorance than with a deep seated ill will towards the mentally ill and ignorance can be dispelled online in blogs, on message boards, at home, in school and even, for some, in the work place.  It all depends.  But the more of us can come out of our hiding places, even in small ways, well, that's the way to start to change the world view on what exactly it means to have a mental illness.

US Elections 2012: Please Vote!

This is such an important election.  Every vote counts, which is why I am urging you to accept the responsibility of casting your vote on Tuesday.  We need to know how the majority really feels.  Do we want to go backwards or do we want to go forward?  Do we want to return to a time when women's rights were more restricted?  Do we want to continue promoting wars abroad at the expense of the men and women who fight them?  Do we want our health care system to be run like a business instead of like a social service where millions of people are excluded from coverage?  Do we want to reward the wealthy at the expense of the rest of us when so many people are struggling just to get by?  For those who are Christian, do you want to be Christian in name only and not in actions?

Barack Obama is not a demi-god; he is a human being.  And as a human being he has done a pretty good job, considering the economic upheavals within the US and the world these past three years.  To lay blame on him for our poor economy, ignoring those who acted irresponsibly in the previous administration, and ignoring the ensuing economic meltdown which has been compared to the Great Depression of the 1930s, is to ignore too many facts.  Mitt Romney is running his campaign on the pledge to create more jobs, to somehow boost our economy by protecting the wealthy while cutting much needed social services.  My good friend Richard, who I know is voting for Romney, said something the other day about how starting another war would be good for our economy.  I don't understand the logic of this.  Men and women are getting killed and maimed and psychologically scarred, but if it's good for the economy, it okay?  When did the state of our economy become more important than the value we put on human life?

I love Richard.  I know he is a good man by his actions.  He is hard working and loyal and generally very decent to everyone he encounters, but his views on the Christian religion (he is Born Again) and his views on politics leave me disturbed and deeply puzzled.  And I know many people in this country believe at least some of what he believes and will vote for Mitt Romney.  Why?  I think really because Romney is a very rich man and for too many financial success is a measure of self-worth and value to one's family and community.  Rich men are smarter than the rest of us.  They are obviously blessed by God.  The irony is that Jesus did not hang with the wealthy so much, but with the poor, disabled, sick, mentally ill, with the people who desperately needed help.

So there is this growing divide in this country.  Most people are already decided.  Whoever wins tomorrow, there will be many, many disappointed people.  How do we heal the US?  It's not just about money and who can generate jobs; it's about social issues and foreign policy.  This is why the divide is so great.  Obviously, I'm a Democrat, but I live in a mostly Republican area, and I know that the people who live here are good people; they are mostly white, poor to middle class and Christian.  We all live amidst the wide open countryside relying on cars to get us around.  There are not a lot of available jobs and some of the younger people join the military because they just don't have the choices that their wealthier counterparts do have.  So many people around here, in support of members of their community who are putting their lives on the line, also support the military.  They are invested in the nationalistic idea that the US must use its armed forces to defend against its enemies in order to secure freedom at home.  And so, war has become a necessary evil and the sacrifices being made are, in their eyes, for a noble reason.  In terms of foreign policy, I would have to say that the people here believe in preserving a large and strong military machine, believe in being tough and punishing towards any threat to the interests of the US.  This means they are committed to starting wars abroad.

To me, being a pacifist, this is a strange and terrible cycle and yet I can understand the logic behind it. There is also logic in Christians believing that abortion is morally wrong, and yet the desire to legislate making the choice for others is also morally wrong.  What I find in much of the Christian Republican perspective is fear.  Fear of "enemies" be they terrorists in foreign lands or socialists at home or moral degenerates who believe that gay couples should have the legal right to marry.  All this fear, all this not turning the other cheek, all this not loving your enemy, all this scorn towards the peacemakers is so very unChristian.  I can't help but look around me and think that too many Americans are hypocrites.  They talk the talk, but when it comes down to the nitty gritty, they don't walk the walk.  But, of course, this is not how they see themselves.  I believe in their minds they see themselves as righteous.  Which leads me to the uncomfortable thought that I'm not the only one who falls into delusional thinking.  The difference for me is that I remain vigilant; I look to spot the flaws in my thinking and feeling.

So here I am encouraging you to do the same.  Delusional thinking can be seductive, can pull you into a world view that seems so real, but is not.  And mass delusional thinking, as I believe we are seeing here in the US, can lead to, in a worst case scenario, a holocaust.  I don't use that word lightly.  I truly believe that much of Christian Republican world view is a symptom of mental illness and that those who are seriously ill should not be in positions of power.  Right wing Republicans try to paint Obama as a flaming liberal, but he is not, as can be seen by the criticism that lefties have laid on the President. Obama moves towards the middle, whereas Romney moves towards the extremists.  I believe this country needs to stay in the middle, which means most definitely caring for the welfare of the middle class and the impoverished, the disabled and the addicted amongst others.  Dismantling the Affordable Care Act, setting women's rights back decades, increasing the military but neglecting veterans, slashing social services and other very important issues are not the way to heal the troubles in the US.

I'm giving a shout out to women, to so-called minorities, to veterans, to the gay community, to the middle class and to the impoverished, to the mentally ill, to the sick, to the old, to Christians who still believe in lovingkindness, inclusiveness and generosity.  Please vote in the election tomorrow.  Stand up and be counted.  Walk the walk.  Let the country as a whole know and the whole world know that we believe in recovery, not just for some, but for everyone.