Into the Void

Byron Katie Newsletter: June 2008

The following quote is exactly what I have been going on about, the need to have an objective observer, one who pushes the ego out of the way and takes a good long look at who we are. The first step to healing is to know what has to be healed.

Byron Katie’s “The Work” is an interesting tool for examining how much misery we cause ourselves by forgetting that what is, is.

Stop by The Work web page to read and listen to the freebies.

I want to go to one of the 5-day events.

“To question that things might not be as they seem can shake the very foundation of habitual clinging. This questioning spirit is the starting point for self-reflection. Could it be that this tightly-knit sense of self is not what it seems? Do we really need to hold everything together, and can we? Is there life beyond self-importance? These kinds of questions open the door to investigating the cause of our suffering.

“The actual practice of self-reflection requires us to step back, examine our experience, and not succumb to the momentum of habitual mind. This allows us to look without judgment at whatever arises, and this goes directly against the grain of our self-importance.

“Self-reflection is the common thread that runs through all traditions and lineages of Buddhist practice. It also takes us beyond the boundaries of formal practice. We can bring the questioning spirit of self-reflection to any situation, at any time. Self-reflection is an attitude, an approach, and a practice. In nutshell, it is a way to make practice come alive for us personally.”

– Aryadeva, Buddhist teacher.

I often sit out in my car at lunchtime and read. The book I’m reading here is (still) Clarissa Pinkola Estés “Women Who Run With the Wolves.” Dr. Estés covers many psychological topics from the anthropological or mythological perspective. If she isn’t a Jungian, she’s missing a great opportunity.

At home I’m reading “Spritual Emergency” edited by Stanislav Grof and Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” I would rather be home, but not because the books are any better. I ran out of an asthma med because my GP got strange about refilling drugs from a Canadian pharmacy. I did so much albuterol last night that I am still shaking.

I am so devoid of dopamine that my concern over my breathing is little more than an intellectual exercise. Y’all know the feeling?

The quote is about creativity, spirit, the river beneath the river. Many topics in the book refer to cycles or to seasons. I wonder as I sit in the sunshine whether I take psych meds to suppress the seasons of my soul.

In archetypical lore there is the idea that if one prepares a special psychic place, then the being, the creative force, the soul source, will hear of it, sense its way to it, and inhabit that place. Whether this force is summoned by the biblical “go forth and prepare a place for the soul” or, as in the film Field of Dreams, in which a farmer hears a voice urging him to build a baseball diamond for the spirits of players past, “If you build it, they will come,” preparing a fitting place induces the great creative force to advance.
Once that great underground river finds its estuaries and branches in our psyches, our creative lives fill and empty, rise and fall in seasons just like a wild river. These cycles cause things to be made, fed, fall back, and die away, all in their right time, and over and over again.
– Clarissa Pinkola Estés in “Women Who Run With the Wolves.”

Thought for the day:

“Actually, it seems to me the life of a middle aged male is a race between hair falling out of its own accord and getting ripped out over stress and irritation. Women have it harder—they have to rip it all out.”
– John Walker, founder of Autodesk in The Hacker’s Diet, Electronic Edition, 1993.

The Zucchini Patch » A Slave to Cigarettes

Jessica of The Zucchini Patch wants to quit smoking. This is my comment. It deals mostly with the money aspect of smoking. They don’t talk about that much in the anti-smoking ads. They talk about cancer only in very vague terms. They show little pictures of the particulate matter that coats the lungs. They don’t talk so much about the reality of drowning in your own putrefying lungs.

Oddly enough, they also don’t talk about the 20% of women with lung cancer who never smoked at all. The politics of the anti-tobacco movement is another story for another day.

Wow. I remember in 1979 saying I’d quit when cigarettes reached 75¢ a pack.

Let’s see…
$3.50/pack × 2 packs/day × 365days/year?
Thats over $2500 a year!

So your first year’s savings are the down payment on a new subcompact car. Each monthly savings after that is the car payment.

Not sure how much daycare costs. Save your savings in a college fund for Marco. In 15 years at 9% interest, the long-term average growth for the stock market, you’d have $65,536.67. (Don’t worry, he’ll get loans and grants for the rest of the cost.)

Or how about taking a week-long yoga retreat at the Omega Institute? Mmmmmmm…

A trip to Paris even with the abysmal exchange rate!

20 steak dinners. Real, digestible steak, not the USDA Choice shoeleather they sell at the supermarket. If you don’t eat meat, give the steak to the dog and enjoy a decadent dessert, a mango souffle perhaps. Heck, fly me up there and I’ll eat your steak. I’m not proud.

See, this is what the cigarette habit is denying you.

I’m having a brain bubble over where you live. I’ll do the tax numbers based on my locale. Federal tax on cigarettes is 39¢ a pack so I’d pay around $280 a year. I wonder whether I can deduct that on my income tax? If Congress manages to raise the tax to $1 a pack (to fund children’s health insurance, they claim) then I’d be paying $730 a year. Hey, it’s “for the chillrun.” My state cigarette tax is $1.35 per pack, for a whopping $980 or so per year. My state income tax is less than that!

Does it seem to you that if the government actually banned cigarettes they’d be losing a big source of income? Hmmmm… almosts makes you want to think.

Ok, now for the real problem with quitting smoking. Nicotine is a powerful anxiolytic and antidepressant. When you quit, you’re not only back to your pre-smoking anxiety levels, but you also have a rebound effect. The HedWeb Good Drug Guide has a lot of excellent information on brain chemical tweaks in general, and nicotine in particular. Here’s a good place to start:
Biopsychiatry.com:: Antidepressants : Nicotine

Both major depression and depressive symptoms are associated with a high rate of nicotine dependence, and a history of major depression has an adverse impact on smoking cessation.

In other words, when you quit smoking it will feel as if you’ve quit psych meds cold turkey. Have you ever made that mistake?

So please don’t beat yourself up if it takes several tries for you to quit. It’s not a moral failing, it is brain chemicals. I’d wait until after the stressful holidays to quit.

I could go into the nuts-and-bolts of how I finally quit in 1986 or so - lots of crying, mostly - but there is plenty of good information available on the web. Email me if you want to hear about it.

“Cosmic Love is absolutely Ruthless and Highly Indifferent: it teaches its lessons whether you like/dislike them or not.”
– Dr. John C. Lilly, “The Dyadic Cyclone”

quoted on John C. Lilly Homepage

Technorati: John+C+Lilly cosmic+love John+Lilly

Spoofcard.com

Oh, this is a fun site. What Spoofcard.com does is allow you to block your telephone Caller ID and disguise your voice. Apparently they offer a service for folks who like to play practical jokes on their cellphones.

No, not really. Where this would come in handy is if you want to display your company phone number when making business calls from your personal phone. You can record the calls and play them back from spoofcard.com’s web control panel. Very nice!

If you aren’t into putting together a 555 timer and a comparator for a barebones audio distortion circuit Spoofcard.com could be a lot of fun.

Rivers Source Botanicals Retail/Wholesale

As a psychiatric patient^w^w shaman wannabe^w^w armchair anthropologist, I am very interested in the varieties of religious experience, to steal a title from psychologist William James. More precisely, I’m interested in different paths to epiphany just as much as I am interested in the content of the epiphanies. The content, you see, is determined by your cultural expectations. (Boring.) The fact that we are wired for bliss amazes me.

But I’m totally off-topic here, aren’t I?

I wanted to put in a plug for Rivers Source Botanicals. They have an excellent selection of heritage plants and seeds to help you create that special healing garden.

The flower pictured here is St. John’s Wort, a plant that is still used medicinally in Europe to treat depression. We can get it in health food stores, but your doctor isn’t likely to prescribe it. RSB often has SJW seeds in stock, along with echinacea, several types of cactus, and many beautiful flowers that you aren’t likely to find in the Home Despot. The prices are astonishingly low, too.

I order some heritage seeds from RSB just about every year. I highly recommend them for all your ethnobotanical needs.

Technorati: ethnobotanical shaman cactus St+Johns+Wort religious+experience William+James

A little dark humor from Tom’s Jokes Collection.

Technorati: dark+humor suicide+hotline suicide

Someone asked what is the difference between a psychiatrist and a psychologist. There are other helping professionals too. They have different levels of education and licensing, and in bipolar disorder it’s important to make sure you get the right one.

Psychiatrists are real medical doctors who specialize in diagnosing and treating mental disorders. After getting a real medical degree they went back and took more courses, then did their internship in psychiatry - well, some are only “board certified,” meaning that they took the exams after the fact. Look at the diplomas. Psychiatrists are the only mental health care professionals who can prescribe drugs *in most states.* They are - and there’s no question here - the only people who are qualified to distinguish between organic disease and mental disorders.
http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=5107

A psychologist has a PhD, also called a doctorate, in the study of psychology. It is very important to remember that even though you call the psychologist “Doctor” he or she is NOT a medical doctor. He probably did an internship in which he did quick evaluations as to mental status. And he’s not qualified to dispense medications because he doesn’t have to have even basic medical training. He isn’t even qualified to put a bandaid on a boo-boo. He certainly isn’t qualified to diagnose physical illnesses - bipolar disorder is associated with brain chemicals, and that’s a medical issue. He is required to send you to a psychiatrist for that. NOT to a nurse practitioner or even a GP. A psychologist is versed in sociology and culture, and their job is to help you gain insight into the experiences that made you whow you are. This is called psychoanalysis or depth therapy. And of course to *adjust* to your circumstances in life.
http://www.apa.org/about/

A psychotherapist is a person who tries to do the same things that the psychologists do. Obviously psychologists and psychiatrists do short-term psychotherapy. Some psychotherapists, however, hold a Master’s Degree in something else. Social workers - MSWs - are trained to hook people up with the right resources, but they often get involved in helping people identify and solve their problems. EdD’s - doctors of Education - again, not medical doctors or even psychologists - often perform psychotherapy. Caveat Emptor: if someone is going to do psychotherapy on you, make sure they’ve gone through it themselves. And make sure they’ve gone through it successfully. Oh, and try to get one from your culture so that they don’t try to cure you of your race or religion. If a psychotherapist other than your own psychiatrist starts giving you a hard time about your meds, think about switching one or the other. Psychotherapists, I like to say, are the gatekeepers of Consensus Reality.

A therapist is a person who helps you make changes in your life - but you have to want to change. They aren’t qualified to do depth psychotherapy and may rely on doubtful modalities - you know, pop psychology out of the latest book by the latest guru.
http://helpyourselftherapy.com/topics/th_job.html

A counselor helps clients solve problems in specific areas - marriage, career, that sort of thing. Most of the time they have Master’s degrees, in some states they don’t have to.
http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos067.htm

I hope this motivates you to check the credentials of your mental health professionals. It is absolutely essential to do so if you want to heal rather than spend the rest of your life helpless and hopeless.

Technorati: difference+between+psychologist+and+psychiatrist psychiatrist psychologist therapist depth+psychotherapy social+worker incompetent+idiots counselor

Any day that starts with an email from someone named “Bad Alice” simply has to be a great day!

Bad Alice is the acoustic duo formed by Suzy Johnston (author of The Naked Bird Watcher - the positive account of developing and learning to manage a serious psychiatric disorder that included depression, psychosis and self-harm)

Leslie interjects: The other half of the duo is Lindsay Robertson. So far as I can tell, she is horribly normal except when she gets a hold of a box of crayons.

The CD by Bad Alice is now available.

Titled ‘Walk in my Shoes’ it is a further positive and reflective message on mental illness, self-harm and the issues that face the young of today.

The CD is available on the Bad Alice website where individual tracks can also be downloaded. http://www.badalicemusic.com

The hope is that the music will help people to feel less isolated and offer reassurance that they can get through this. It is also meant to raise further awareness, understanding and - hey - people might even like the songs!

Cheers,

Bad Alice
http://www.badalicemusic.com/
http://www.thecairn.com/

Excellent CD. It’s only number two in my 6-disc changer, but Bad Alice would have to play tuned chain saws to get ahead of Herbie Hancock’s Headhunters - classic Jazz Fusion c. 1972.

I hope to get to Scotland on my next trip to Liverpool. If luck is with me, Bad Alice will have a gig when I’m there.

Suzy’s mum Jean is a great mum, I’m told, and a very cool lady. She even wrote her own book, To Walk on Eggshells, about her experiences helping her daughter navigate the dire straits of the mental health system in the UK. Family involvement is a big positive in handling bipolar disorder effectively.

The CD costs £6.50 postpaid in the UK. Not sure about the rest of the world, but it’s also available as mp3s. Buy it with PayPal and download it on the spot.

Technorati: bad+alice suzy+johnston indie depression psychosis self+harm The+Naked+Bird+Watcher mp3