Healing Journey
Healing posts log my journey to mental wholeness through psychotherapy, medicine journeys, spiritual retreats, and life lessons. Initially it is hard to be self-aware of your own mental illness. You have to find out the hard way. When life and reality painfully break through the layers of your confusion and you are finally forced into confrontation with your own self as the cause of the repeating negative patterns in your life. Neither life nor society are patient or kind towards the mentally ill. You have to find the courage and self-honesty to help your self and move first out of active naked brokenness into maskable functionality, and then only then towards more and more genuine wholeness. Only then does your hard won inner well-being get reflected in life as outer well-being. The older posts are mostly a collection of old working notes on healing modalities that I was trying at the time. As well as books I’ve read, and reflective reviews on meditation techniques and therapies.
I am well now. And new posts mostly focus my self-reflective work trying to understand what happened to me – what causes mental illness and suffering in the individual and how it can be treated on an individual and social level. My personal mental health focuses now on maintaining balance and purifying the mind at the deepest levels.
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Impersonally & Compassionately Being with (Self) Hate & Fear
Intention: My intention is to be able to remain at peace when this difficult emotion/vibration comes up. To simply no longer take it personally, but rather welcome it and give it permission to be in my body without reacting to it or identifying with it. To be able to remain present as presence: holding it…
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Writing to Heal: Letter of Impersonal Compassion to Abuser.
Beloved Abusive 2nd Step-Father Teacher, The psychological dominance of my mother – where you effectively reprogrammed her into compliance: avoiding behaviors that triggered your aggression and rewarding her submission with stroking and approval – left me motherless and unsafe. I blamed you for that, but now see that on some level she willingly chose to…
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Impersonally & Compassionately Being with Shame
Intention: My intention is to be able to remain at peace when this difficult emotion/vibration comes up. To simply no longer take it personally, but rather welcome it and give it permission to be in my body without reacting to it or identifying with it. To be able to remain present as presence: holding it…
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Impersonally & Compassionately Being with Sex
Intention: My intention is to be able to remain at peace when this difficult emotion/vibration comes up. To simply no longer take it personally, but rather welcome it and give it permission to be in my body without reacting to it or identifying with it. To be able to remain present as presence: holding it…
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Healing Disassociation: Choosing to stay with difficult feelings
I’ve come a very long way from the inwardly ungrounded young man who barely registered the existence or relevance of other people and outwardly could only make intensely intellectual and philosophical conversation from the mind and had no sense of how to dress or groom or even brush his teeth and put deodorant on. With…
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Impersonally & Compassionately Being with Loneliness
Intention: sence: holding it in impersonal awareness that remains now – while feelingly in embodied contact with the sensation of it in the present – and holding it in unconditional love. To purify personal identification with this information and all the patterns of feeling, thought, and behavior. The end goal is to be able to…
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Healing Protocol: Towards Unconditional Self-Love
“avoidance of legitimate suffering is the root of all mental illness” C. Jung If I have made any progress in my mental health over the decades it is to the extent I have grounded out of disassociation into the embodied present. Healing mental illness and awakening resolves to this: the willingness to see and fully experience the…
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Neurogenesis & Synaptogenesis: How to bring under-connected areas of the brain back online.
Following on my previous post about the book: Childhood Disrupted How your biography becomes your biology and how you can heal by Donna Jackson Nakazawa – a look at steps she states can help ” create new neurons (neurogenesis), make new synaptic connections between those neurons (synaptogenesis), promote new thought patterns and reactions, and bring…
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Book: Whole Again by Jackson MacKenzie
The book’s core concept is that a traumatic core wound leaves a false message embedded in our psyches. These false, negative self-beliefs are what actually continue to hurt us: that the story or events or context or content of the original situation is not really the issue. (Ultimately, everything is impersonal: we were wounded by…
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Overnight Subliminal Subconscious Reprogramming:
I’ve done this before trying to brainwash myself while I sleep with sanskrit mantras and prayers. These youtube affirmations work even better for me. I believe that in a healthy attachment process the child would subconsciously absorb positive self-beliefs (these affirmations) from the parent through their body language, energy field, and behaviour. Lacking the vibrational…
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Meditation: R.A.I.N -Tara Brach
R.A.I.N meditation by Tara Brach was suggested to me as a practice to come into contact with numbness and limiting self-beliefs. R-A-I-N stands for Recognize, Allow, Investigate, Nurture. Tara Brach has a wealth of mediations and talks at the cross-section of mental health and awakening which is where I find myself. I am so grateful…
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Meditation: Self-Forgiveness by Jack Kornfield
Jack Kornfield is a Buddhist teacher and covers a lot of mediation topics related to healing the personal and intra-personal. His website is here: https://jackkornfield.com/meditations/ I made myself the following shopping list to try in my daily practice: https://jackkornfield.com/mind-like-ocean/ https://jackkornfield.com/reconciliation-meditation/ https://jackkornfield.com/refuge-in-difficult-times/ https://jackkornfield.com/gratitude-and-generosity-meditation/ https://jackkornfield.com/joy-mudita-meditation/ https://jackkornfield.com/grounding-practice/ https://jackkornfield.com/align-yourself-with-goodness-meditation/ https://jackkornfield.com/breathe-love-in-breathe-love-out-meditation/ https://jackkornfield.com/temple-of-healing-meditation/ https://jackkornfield.com/the-medicine-of-the-dharma-meditation/ https://jackkornfield.com/worldwide-healing-of-love/
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Intention to Heal
I want to remind myself, lest I fall into personal identification with the healing journey and turn it into an identity, that nothing belongs to me. That the life story of my personal self, my psyche, my mental health, and my healing are not mine for me to be preoccupied and concerned about. They are…
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Book: Orthomolecular Treatment for Schizophrenia by A. Hoffer M.D., Ph.D.
Having formerly been diagnosed as schizophrenic as an adolescent (15) and admitted into long-term back wards of mental hospitals both in France and the UK until I was 18, I got this book to understand Schizophrenia and what may have happened to me better. It’s a lovely quick little read. Apart from the obvious list…
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Book: Childhood Disrupted by Nakazawa
Childhood Disrupted How your biography becomes your biology and how you can heal by Donna Jackson Nakazawa. One of the most useful metaphors and concepts the book introduces is the idea of chronic and unpredictable stress in the chapter titled “the Rattled Cage”. This chapter describes experiments with rodents that conclude that ongoing low-level but…
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Core self-beliefs
The accuracy of the memories is irrelevant. In fact, the original experience that was lived through with such identification and assigned so much reality that it caused you to develop a rigid and persistent core belief about yourself and the world is actually irrelevant too. All that matters is the actual nature of the inner…
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Rishikesh 2019
Ramana’s Garden, Lakshman Jhula, Rishikesh 2019 Many happy memories. My first time working with children. My Guru at the time told me I should be working with children over and over again. She finally set it up for me to volunteer at Ramana’s Garden orphanage and school. The founder had been a disciple of the…