Mental Health
These poems relate my struggle to become self-aware of mental illness and my journey towards mental health.
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I had a deeply broken early childhood with lots of abuse and instability that continued up until I left home. In the midst of all the abuse I had a satori awakening experience as an adolescent. After a particularly nasty fight with my parents the police were called, and after a psych-evaluation I wound up as a teen in mental hospital.
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The psychiatrist diagnosed my disbelief in a personal self as pathological delusion. Whether or not I was actually psychotic is a mute point, because anti-psychotic drugs induce psychosis in the non-psychotic. After turning 18 and hiring a lawyer to overturn the diagnosis I left mental hospital. Later on, Ayahausca smashed through any lingering psychosis in my young adult-hood, however it was then that trauma of previous abuse started manifesting.
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It has taken many years of psychotherapy, healing, medicine journeys, and spiritual practice to come to the point of living as a stable functional adult capable of loving connection with others. Now, the work continues on – not just rebuilding what was broken, but on constructing neuronal pathways that were never developed. My therapy now focuses more on subtle aspects of behaviour, self-care, survival strategies and integrating a fractured psyche.
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Loneliness
Looking back now, I can see the desperation. The hollowness within, and the desperate flight not to feel it, to throw my self completely away, and beg, the world and others, to fill with God-that-can-be experienced the void of God-that-can-not-be-known within me. Ignorant that I was ever filled and ever one: too numb to know…
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Who wants me?
Mum is One in whom One finds total safety and absolute belonging. Dad is One in whom One finds gentle power and unconditional significance. Guru is One in whom One finds perfect emptiness. One presence pouring and refracting through the prism/person projecting all these coloured lights. All that in others you have been seeking: find…
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Puzzle of Community
I am not sure I can form attachment bonds to others. I can love: deeply and sincerely too, but it’s of the moment. Setting aside society’s moral ideal of eternal love, why is it so? There is perhaps too much fear of the other. Or, like a candle sharing its flame to light another, one…
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Being Nice
I am nice because I’m scared, and within the realm of social community, niceness keeps me safe, from the evil eye of negative judgment. Because that’s all it takes, for all the doors to close: to be locked out of a group, and fall out of civilization, into, homelessness, and sheer life or death survival,…
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Absolute Terror
The life or death terror of a baby: everlasting without sense of time, is as absolute as its helplessness. The baby: helplessly overwhelmed by fear, lives on as the ever anxious adult, whose thinking – ever fearing: tomorrow; that all their nightmare will come true. The adult must deconstruct their fearful thinking, and with sharp…
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All the little games
All the little games, we play under our masks, can get a little dark. Hidden selfishness: counterfeit sentiment. Suffocating in a society, so emotionally contorted, while private crookedness, runs the show, and writes our public-persona’s lines. This synthetic harmony, of docile niceness, lubricates and quenches, with the sludge of brainless convention, the friction that might…
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Mint & Rose
Mint and rose are my favourite flavours. A person has finally coalesced and stabilized like a mid-winter fruit from the spiraling vine of my damaged and traumatized mental continuum. A “me and my life” is. Grateful as I am, I see that this person is just the current flower head of a perennial continuum of…
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exit all thinking
The past is a fairy tale that you can simply cease to read. You have covered your whole face over with a children’s book, forgetting who you truly are, and with its pages as your blinders, it is you yourself that turns away from seeing the light of the living day. Re-reading over and over…
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Too unstable for enlightenment
The survival response to trauma keeps the mind intensely focused on the embodied emergency of the organism and the seemingly self-evident suffering of the personal self. Self-identity with the intensity of pain and strong emotion further pollutes the psychological self with a victim-self-consciousness that strengthens the disconnection and duality of subject/object that is itself the…
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Song of the Centipede
Something poisonous bit my cheek, by my ear, as I slept, rage at the pain filled my spirit with the venom of a heartless hate, as my consciousness expanded to hunt and destroy the hated thing that had done this. The opening window of my seeing locked on to its target, I saw her –…
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lost happiness
when you understand phenomenal experience doesn’t generate happiness – rather, that unconditional self fulfillment of the unlocated referencless self is itself the overflowing of happiness into the phenomenal in the the now – then, the inner psychological stories of lost happiness and dreams of future happiness become empty mirages. Undeluded be at peace.
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CPTSD
Our mind’s are built for us, by the adult’s in our childhoods. Each interaction a response to our existence: shaping and defining our self-concept in the world. Linguistic interactions between cognitive selves, can be talked through and re-conditioned. But, prelinguistic input prior to a cognitive self, becomes neurological, physiological, epigenetic. I – the conscious self-…
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Limerence
Limerence is the fever dream of the broken-hearted child: that still lives inside you, still grieves inside you, yearning to be held: to be emotionally completed by that idealized mother, by that idealized other. That child’s stream of grieving, stream of yearning; stream of dreaming, pouring forth through the channels of your adult mind like…
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Learn Love
Love is the source of life. Love is the living well of movement, of self, of will, of action. Without love, life is just fading momentum without true propulsion the meaningless escape of residual heat without real fire: mechanical, violent, arbitrary. My loveless little heart can not nourish it’s own life force, let alone be…
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Truly seen
A toddler. Pre-personal. Innocent. Our eyes meet, they scan and tune into me, and in my body I feel vulnerable, and a jolt of terror of being fully seen, in all my emotional ugliness. Without layers to their person-hood, in meeting a toddler there is a simple intimacy: a fully open being directly experiencing you.…
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Victory
Victory is this: hand on heart, rejoicing “I love you all, and, I’m grateful for every one and everything” wearing every moment lived like the beads of a beaded necklace: the stellar corona of your unseen heart. singing your life as a devotional song filling the empty and silent with music: ever celebrating this infinite…