“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 embodied impersonal truth in the present moment.
The actual practice (of becoming more willing to be with and experience what is) is the growth of self-love. Self-love supports the expansion of awareness into uncomfortable and unpleasant feelings, especially self-judgments and negative self-beliefs. Uncovering and removing the underlying negative self-beliefs and replacing them with unconditional self-love and positive self-beliefs brings the psyche in alignment with the truth of our basic goodness as pure awareness/being. After a critical mass of embodied presence is amassed a shift from a stable self-loving personal self to the self-fulfilled impersonal self occurs – where the self-fulfillment and unconditional self-love of the impersonal self eliminates the needs for an ego whatsoever as the content of experience become irrelevant to the indestructible self-fulfillment of pure presence.
The self-fulfillment of unconditional self-love eliminates neediness: purifying connections from clingy emotional attachment and expectations. Instead of relationships serving a purpose to fill a personal need, they become purposeless natural things: beautiful because they simply are.
Based on this insight, my self prescribed self-love protocol follows:
As I am yet emotionally numb due to either brain areas with less connectivity or unintegrated/psychosomatically embodied parts of my body-mind.
A daily yoga practice for embodiment.
Programming Water: program water with unconditional love and gift it to your body with the intention for the unconditional love to be delivered where it needs to to nourish every cell.
plus, Tara’s RAIN has to be a daily part of my mental hygiene practice to reconnect to my feeling state and be with difficult feelings.
At the same time, to regrow activity in the brain Metta and Self-Forgiveness.
and as not to get too stuck in the “story of me” that might bubble up as I feel through old feelings, some Gayatri mantra mediation and Self-enquiry to objectify and depersonalize any identity with form.
Then silent sitting.
Finally, sleep with overnight subconscious affirmations. I reason that negative self-beliefs removed by replacing them positive ones. That positive self-beliefs, in a normal family situation, would be picked up by the child almost in transmission, because how we think about ourselves and how we believe in ourselves is expressed through body-language and behaviour in subconcious ways. So in terms of conscious re-parenting positive affirmations are best done, likewise, via the subconscious.