Western Medicalization of Spirituality (Draft of Holistic Gaian Consciousness/Story)
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Yet to be added thoughts…from concentrate. Part of this complete lifelong breakfast.
https://twitter.com/bennirubber/status/1218164870807420929?s=21 Silent Planet “endless dance with entropy, ware, endless war” reversing the wounds of the world will be very rewarding because the wounds of Gaia are all tied up in each of our lived experiences and trauma. I want us to honor hour grief and put back all of ourselves and the bioregions we’ve been ripped from. It will be musical and artistic, there will be much laughter as we resolve the grief tied up and cutting off oxygen within our unexamined assumed dichotomy paradoxes our brains have spun. Plan for another 500–1000 years before we are one with our biosphere’s evolved wisdom to innovate in response to our humble listening relationship we’ve returned to.
https://twitter.com/bennirubber/status/1268896507551506434?s=21
Mental Problems Are A Spiritual Illness
Dr. Malidoma Patrice Somé is a West African shaman who, along with the Dagara people, has said that what we call mental illness may actually be a spiritual awakening in progress. Somé has stated that mental disorders occur when your spirit is in crisis and that it signals that the person involved has begun the process of known as, “the birth of a healer.”
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I want to invite a conversation on how mental health matters are entangled with the human drive to be in service of something greater than oneself.
As a dangerously frustrated and passionate 30 year old millennial who recently became a father, I’ve found myself knocking on the old door of my bipolar quicksand that I was diagnosed with 12 years ago.
Many individuals I’ve talked earnestly with, who have been diagnosed any number of personality disorders or pidgin holed with a generic psychotic disorder label, have had the experience of different psychiatrists labeling them with a ‘number in the hat’ esc approach in their diagnoses. For me, I understand diagnosis as your box, your cubby for your shoes in kindergarten, where you will be categorized and homogeneously herded in their mind.
A primary defining trauma of my life is that I was denied full autonomy after I lost grip on my regular sleep cycle, or circadian rhythm, several weeks after starting my first year of college. I was admitted to a psych ward as an 18 year old who thought that something extra-planetary was going down in the global mind organism. By that time, everyone in my social sphere knew that I was a little quirk, and some were delightfully entertained with my thought patterns that deviated from a typical conversational rhythm.
was that I was not provided, nor could I begin to articulate, what vision had shaken me from my lifelong mental slumber. I was told that I was defective somewhere between my mind and body, a “chemical imbalance” in my brain was what I told my peers who looked on me with discomfort or disdain. It was similar to the discomfort some people experience in the face of anything that outlines humanities mortality or general fleeting stability, that our lives can drastically change at any time. Later in my life my life, when my father became a quadriplegic, I observed how his friends and family dealt differently with their grief from the loss of the highly ambulatory aspects of his identity.
It reminds me of the unwritten comfort in ritual that we can hide behind when “there are no words” that can express our thoughts or feelings precisely to someone grieving the loss of a loved one. “Sorry for your loss” and other social around death were hhhhhhhhthe ourto jump through our culture subscribes to comfort someone grieving. loss of a loved one, when people have Perhaps the homunculus had been melted by its vigorous reckoning between silent space and the atmosphere of this planet? Perhaps I was one of many who is gradually realizing that our species is not exchanging a meaningful authentic dialogue about the cliff we are inevitably ‘coming in hot’ toward.
As a species that did not evolve to fly, we had better begin to put the ‘sapien’ back in the word(s) homo-sapien. We need to simulate the imminent trajectory of our path back down to the ground. We need to formulate the appropriate use of “hope”. Michael Dowd, an eco-theist, and great comedian as well in my opinion, states that hope without any basis in primary reality is delusional or suicidal.
After my run in with being raised in a destabilized, distended culture obsessed with exponential everything, that has thrown the baby of a spiritual ‘rite of passage’ out with the water of religion bath water, my first diagnoses was “psychosis not otherwise specified”. What a word salad, right? And I thought word salad was just a symptom of schizophrenics. Perhaps its a symptom of a culture with chronic monoculturing mental muscle spasms that result in a compartmentalization of every mineral or molecule that makes up the collective global sociological psycho-spiritual-biological context. Similar to how a monoculture necessitates more expenses to control for the dysfunctional anti-life anaerobic scenarios they blindly create, our compartmentalizing culture creates more exacerbations of mental health Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
for my deeper dreams that I see unrealized in the world in front of me.
A question that arose while typing this… how does identity politics or pre-mature game b spirituality prevent us from realizing the goals of game B?
Heres some of my thoughts on spirituality as I have been doing my own self exploration in response to not being provided a rite of passage as a young man. By rite of passage I mean a healthy outlet for my ecological angst, or the self-identity transformation of my ‘trauma cocoon’ as a young man, into a healthy free roaming butterfly or psycho-spiritual-socio-biological context for my deeper dreams that I see unrealized in the world in front of me.
My anxiety about the impotence of societal level human dialogue in the face of a civilization in need of and collapse and reorganization around regenerative principles based on the laws of nature/Gaia has led me to obsess about various ideas in books, podcasts, and lots of online media over the past several years. This has been my primary cathartic therapy that energizes me to flutter around my heartache for the more beautiful world our hearts know is possible and get through my day.
I recently found this Good Grief Network from catching up with Michael Dowd’s Post Doom Conversation Series on YouTube. I’ve been I’m finding more and more arable cognitive soil in exploring mental health in relation to “ecological angst” that many hull up in our hearts. Our culture doesn’t often facilitate a humane humble honest open context for someone stumbling into an identity crisis or transformation process. We have rigid definitions of success or meaning and subsequently, rigid institutional endocrinology to fit into.
Our understanding of emotions asnd their effects on our well being need to be understood as a cost in an emotional accounting. Interdependent relationships rather than monitored insurance through insurance companies. In Michael Dowd’s Post Doom conversation series with https://youtu.be/sHX9iWBKGdY at 36:40?
When we turn away and don’t honor our heart ache for the world we yearn for, or our denied place in, it can manifest as depression, a subconscious weight on our heart and motivation. This can fulfill theMy pain pushed me into a new landscape of questions in 2015.
My lifelong self and sociological searching peaked in 2015 after I was soured away from the human services industry I jumped into after graduating with a bachelor’s in Pyschology from Wells College. that regarded me as turning into putting more and more of my down time to exploring
https://www.goodgriefnetwork.org/ Home -
I typically start my day before devoting it to the accidental wage labor god of our time by waking up early enough to have an hour to myself to take in some piece of online media or more recently, a book. I’ve resurrected my childhood autism/Asperger tendency to experience intense absorption in specialized subjects. I seem to have resurrected my childhood habit of escaping to my headphones for music to avoid dysfunctional social cyclones that my hormone tormented peers were spinning in school. I’ve always needed a certain level of mental stimulation growing up as well as into my adult life. I’ve grown different ways of dealing with the boredom of typical social interactions as well. I’m eager to foster authentic interactions with others to harvest the dormant wisdom in all our hearts. I have come to understand that we humans all have parts of ourselves in our identities that observe different rules and guidelines. The evolved area of our thinking that we’ve disregarded is what I come to regard as fuzzy or squishy logic. I’ve learned to keep this aspect of myself shelved. Every once and a while I pick up the thought to look it over see if any of my experiences have affected it’s shape or color and how it fits or doesn’t jive with primary reality.
a free …“in service to Gaia” study group. ing how we connect with each other on social media. It is ohttps://earth-regenerators.mn.co/share/uXwdSLgsn-2HeIFr
During a time when we need all our humble grieving hands on deck healing Gaian flesh, it’s important for us to maintain mind/body stability, the pre-requisite to clairity. The diversity encompassed in human ways of manifesting in this world with it’s particular laws of physics span a range of neuro-diverse and neuro-typical human brains. in the bio-geo-chemical time scale terms where the seventh generation is primary, the recent short sighted industrial perpetual progress fueled energy blind and ecologically illiterate narrative of the past few centuries, We are on a path of re-integration with Gaian intelligence as a whole. If that has been mentioned as far as incorporating it into this emerging holistic species wide understanding send me a link or point it out.
The past week in this group has been obnoxiously but cathartically engaging for me. I have a personal history with how slippery reality can get when I neglect my body’s brother/father sun conducted circadian rhythm.
At least for the next week or two I’m going to be printing things out and doing my best to self regulate my screen time since it interferes with the mind and bodies evolved mechanism that maintain a mental state we might call “normal”.
I have a curious but risky tangle between spiritual thinking, what I call squishy or fuzzy logic, with my tendency to obsessive over maximizing every interaction using digital technology. With my yet to be fully matured basic human spiritual capacity, perhaps as many young men like me who were not provided a healthy outlet in a cultural rite of passage, I can lean too far into ideas or spiritual hypothesis that I lose track of my body and mind’s finite ability to function stably without the requisite metabolic yields from sleeping.
My experiences in life have led me to work with the developmentally disabled for a career and I’ve been thinking about this “population”, people call it, in regard to the transition our species is at the forefront of. To use an analogy from my beer brewing days, I’d liken it to the isomerization of hop oils when they’re boiled in the brewing process. Our entire civilization and conceptions of human nature and potentially are going to build like hops. When hop oils are boiled their chemical make up is rearranged into either bitterness on the back of the tongue or delicate volatile fleeting aromas that register in our olfactory nostril hole complex. These two sensory systems are interdependent. For example, if you have a cold, or plug your nose while you will not taste things the same.
For the next two weeks I’m going to be printing out material or assignments that Joe Brewer posts so that I can work with the ideas and my thoughts away from a computer screen. I can’t wait to use my local library as a study area with the hopes of putting the conversation out to my local community along with Helena Norberg-Hodges “Local is our Future” book club discussion/webinar with the author model.
Because this forum’s scope is of vital importance to me and “the prodigal species” coming home to Gaia, it has spiked my screen time.
During a “manic psychosis” my first year in college a police officer and I had a cordial conversation after I got in his car because I knew he was there for me. I had gone out the dorm exit door after hours and set off the alarm. He asked me if I was autistic halfway through our conversation and I was struck by how delighted he was that I was so personable in a quirky way.
My mind had been racing and I ended up not being able to sleep and staying up for around 35 hours until, after my parents admitted me to the local psych ward, the staff had to hold me down against my consent and gave me a shot to help me sleep.
It’s the best western medicine could do for me. I’ve since learned that in other cultures I wouldn’t be seen as needing to be sedated but listened to and helped in carrying out a sort of spiritual rite of passage process.
That was in 2007 and I’ve been wondering if I have aspergers or autistic capacities since then. I was diagnosed bipolar by a cocky psychiatrist who could tell my mother just needed the comfort of a diagnosis. It was thought I would need to be on upper and downer medications for the rest of my life. I either have a very light version of bipolarity and so don’t need them or I’m in fact as crazy they thought but have been able to maintain enough self awareness to prevent manic psychosis from happening again.
It was a very unique situation that led to it happening. The psych ward didn’t know what was going on with me and gave me the hands in the air diagnosis which is “psychosis not otherwise specified”. I was very excited about the deep conversations I was having with a couple mentors as well as burning the candle at both ends with work, school, and sports. I just found out what it’s like to mess with my brain by not getting enough sleep.
I recently read “Neurodiversity” by Judy Singer. It led me to some great realizations about what had happened to me on that night and what social factors in my upbringing led to the abrupt scrambling for who/what/how I am to be in this world. At various times I’ve been able to recall more thoughts and actions I did that night which helps me put more of the situation into my own shelved identity puzzle do to speak.
The only two items on the list she gave for asperger/autistic spectrum traits I identified with were having a tendency to obsessive over a certain topic and being able to parse my thoughts from being what I think instead of what my emotions lead me to think. But I think these are capacities that are possible for us all to have given certain conditions.
I look forward to learning more about how those with aspergers or autism can be welcomed into the greater human community as important aspects of the whole rather than those who need services. Also, I’ve been working with developmentally disabled since 2014 when I got my bachelors in psychology and started living wage labor life.
As oversized top heavy bureaucratic structures topple over in the face of the decaying neoliberal american dream/nightmare, we see primary conservative values of smaller governments & institutions that are more cohesive with the human mind and body as providing a proper temporary container or midwife. We will birth a new decentralized human metabolism re-integrated with the complex extra-terrestrial ecology of the physics we find ourselves at the mercy of in this part of our universe which afforded “sapiens” (Latin for ‘wise man’) the context to make such missteps on their path to Gaian scale holistic symbiosis.
https://twitter.com/bennirubber/status/1248913054240292864?s=21
