WillSpirit

Where Will meets Spirit
∞ A Blog Devoted to Balance, Peace, and Clarity ∞

A formerly depressed physician tells stories of trauma, grief and recovery, and offers suggestions for emerging from darkness, living with mood swings, and awakening to life.








  • Red_Exclamation_DotDisclaimer
    • Dear Visitors:
      Although I trained and practiced as a physician, my background does not include formal instruction in psychiatry beyond basic medical education. This journal presents ideas about treatment philosophy, but must not be considered therapeutic advice. Abrupt changes in one's psychiatric medications can trigger profound cognitive, emotional, and physical symptoms, including suicidal thoughts and actions. Consequently, pharmaceutical agents should not be increased or decreased without supervision by a mental health clinician.

    • ON THE OTHER HAND, your brain belongs to you, and your opinion counts. If you decide that changing your medication regimen will serve your best interest, then I believe your providers have an obligation to help you try to achieve your goals. I want everyone to be educated about their options, and do what will be most helpful for themselves. No one should feel pushed around by dogmatic and/or limited viewpoints, whether those of psychiatrists, anti-psychiatry advocates, or myself.




Stepping Toward Serenity


My idea is to write a series of short(er) posts that will help me stay in a centered frame of mind. My last entry described how I vacillate between oceanic acceptance and claustrophobic self-pity. The human mind can shape itself, and I intend to sculpt mine to stand with contentment and stability in the gale of fate. I’ve grown tired of crumbling, and knowing there is an alternative, I have committed to solidity and balance.


Success requires more than a vow. Action is mandatory. There are countless steps I take to improve my frame of mind. I work to buttress my weak areas, exercise my strengths, and explore new modes of thought and being. My plan is to write a short piece more or less daily, with an eye toward concrete behavioral, cognitive, or spiritual actions I employ (or should employ) to increase the proportion of time lived in the space of equanimity.


THINK LESS!

In earlier times, I prided myself on my intelligence. Half way through a rebellious high school career I took to heart what people had been telling me since toddlerhood: I had a good mind. With little else to prop up my self esteem, I began applying myself in studies and quickly raised my grades. In college I found an environment where sharp thinking was rewarded. I excelled in analytical sciences even more than in biology, though the latter was my passion. My father had innate mathematical talent, and I may have inherited the trait. Or perhaps living in a dangerous and chaotic family trained me to scrutinize and scheme. No matter where it came from, I had an ability to problem solve that was noted repeatedly and carried me to a reasonable level of academic success. Thinking gave me a rewarding career, financial security, and feelings of power.

As I sketched in yesterday’s essay, however, all that evaporated ten years ago. Ever after, compulsive thinking has been a liability rather than an asset. I can spend long, boring hours ruminating about my losses and my fears. If I don’t stop myself, I analyze my life from every conceivable angle, always looking for an escape route. Something inside desperately wants to fix my predicament. But thinking is not the answer. It only keeps my frustrations on center stage, and accelerates the engine of anxiety. It has taken a long time for me to truly believe this, and it requires ongoing effort to change my pattern.

I strive to think less. Even with that goal foremost in my awareness, my mind manages to churn out plenty of thoughts, more than enough to solve my various problems and prepare for the future. But whenever I notice my mind thinking aimlessly, or worrying, or criticizing, I stop. There are many tricks I use. Since my goal is to make these entries short, I’ll name just one.

Let’s say I’m walking and worrying at the same time. This happens often. If I catch myself, I start doing a body scan. The body scan is a simple mindfulness exercise taught in meditation classes, especially those given in clinical settings. One moves one’s conscious attention from one extreme of the body to the other. One can start with head or feet, but I usually start low and work up. I pay attention to one foot at a time, focusing in turn on each toe, or even each part of each toe, and then moving to the sole of my foot, the top, the sides, the inner sensations of the joints, and so on. I explore the feelings in each location for one or two breaths, and move on. I finish with one foot and then move to the other. I complete the feet and journey to the ankles, calves, knees and on up my body. If the walk ends before the scan reaches the head, I make a mental note to pick up where I left off on the next walk.

It’s a busier walking meditation than Buddhists teach, but it’s what my mind needs to distract itself. It’s a challenge to feel the fourth toe, for instance. My brain just never focused on it before, and I have to strengthen the sensory pathway. It’s interesting to pay attention to the movements in all the many foot bones, and feel the pressure of the ground transmit through my feet to my legs. I feel far more in touch with my body from doing this practice. Better yet, I think less.

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Stepping Toward Serenity was published on July 20th, 2010, with these tags: , , , . To date, this entry has received 2 comments.






Building a Peaceful Mind

ToolBox

About four years ago, the mental health providers who were helping me encouraged me to ramp up my meditation practice. I’d been pursuing silent worship and retreats as a quaker for twenty years by that point, and had taken my first mindfulness meditation class six years earlier. But I had slacked off in my efforts. Since that prompting to be more serious about meditating, I’ve found settling into the mind that lies beneath surface turmoil to be very helpful to my emotional balance. No doubt many readers will find what I write to be naive, which is unavoidable given that my intensive practice began so recently. Still, meditation helps my state of mind so much that I can’t resist commenting on a recent realization.

When I first began to practice mindfulness meditation on a regular basis, my instructors cautioned me to toss out the idea of emptying the mind of thought. They taught me to observe thoughts, sensations, and emotions without trying to influence them. Given the context of a psychiatry clinic, these instructions were all presented from a medical perspective; they followed the Jon Kabat-Zinn formulation. There are many other approaches to meditation, and some schools place more emphasis on achieving a mind free of domination by verbal thought streams. But that early teaching held, and for a long time I assumed that attaining silence in the mind would be difficult if not impossible.

Being a newcomer to this practice style, it’s no surprise that I’m finding my early understanding to be incomplete. More and more, I’m finding it easy to shut down verbal thought, and not only while formally meditating. It’s becoming a bit of a refuge, in fact. When I find myself starting to obsess, and especially when the thoughts take a negative turn (as they almost inevitably do), I find it easiest to just stop thinking. Cognitive Behavior Therapy taught me to challenge my assumptions, and recognize the distortions in my interpretations. To do so is still useful at times, but often the quicker route to relief is to simply shut down the thought apparatus. It takes a bit of effort, and it certainly requires that I remain conscious and alert, but it’s not as hard as I believed. If I were to dissect the experience, I would probably find a few echoing words deep in my awareness, but the loud and intrusive thinking is becoming relatively easy to turn off.

I sleep better as a result. It used to be that worries or even pleasant fantasies kept me awake; there was always something that seemed interesting to attend to. If I shut down the thinking apparatus, in contrast, then if my body is tired sleep soon comes. If sleep eludes me it usually means I’m not that tired, and I either get up for a while or I lay on my back and simply experience the peace in my mind. It’s another opportunity to meditate.

Once on my Twitter stream I wrote, “If you can’t think anything nice, don’t think anything at all.” Although I think this phrase was my own creation, it’s possible I heard it somewhere; it is a variation, in any event, on the old line: “Don’t believe everything you think.” Regardless of its origin, the statement was meant more as a joke than true advice, but now I’m taking it to heart. I’ve added the technique to my chest of tools for building peace and sanity.

Looking back, I realize it has taken a bit of discipline and practice to get to this point, and that my ability to achieve tranquility has gradually increased over time. Recognizing how my understanding has progressed makes me realize that meditation must have many surprises in store for me. The recent trend in mental health toward emphasis on mindfulness (seemingly the preferred label for meditation in clinical circles) appears to be well founded. Especially for someone like me, who once pursued favorable mind states so vigorously that I developed troubling relationships with intoxicants, the discovery of self-generated tranquility is profound. Anyone dedicated to improving mental health probably already knows the value of meditation, but if you have delayed putting that knowledge into practice, I highly recommend meditating regularly.

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Building a Peaceful Mind was published on March 6th, 2010, with these tags: , , . To date, this entry has received 5 comments.






A Truth Beyond Words

SacredEgg

‘Spiritual’ experiences span a range of possibilities. The chirping birds and fertile scents of a rain-soaked meadow can transform the receptive person. Such scenes fill the mind with a soft awareness of nature’s magic, bringing one to a grace that lies at the subtle end of the spectrum. At the other end lies the ego-shattering breakthrough, where God’s immanence saturates the heart and mind, until one nearly weeps from feelings of unity with creation. A week ago my soul was blessed with an opening to transcendence somewhere in the middle. After reverently taking leave of my companions, I entered a grove of old-growth redwoods for a five-hour solitary ‘Spirit Walk’. The trees are so wide and tall that it becomes easy to recognize one’s smallness in the face of creation. The first branches don’t jut from the trunks until a hundred feet or so above the cathedral-like spaces that underlie the canopy. The ground is wet from the ceaseless dripping of the boughs above, and it is soft to the step, with inches of decomposing vegetation underfoot. For one hour, I meditated beneath a tree that was probably close to two thousand years old, and as wide as a typical bedroom.

For at least twenty years I’ve pondered how to reconcile my knowledge of biology and physics with my sense of spiritual presence on earth. While sitting beneath that tree, my tentative answers coalesced into a heartbreaking awareness of Truth. On a very deep level, I perceived the evanescence and formlessness of the human mind, the interplay between humans and nature, and how everything intertwines in the awesome depths of creation. The way the human spirit dwells amidst vast spreads of time, space, and scale became clear to me in ways that surpass words. After my meditation, I walked for miles through the woods, while deeper and deeper layers of creation seemed to open to my understanding. In future months I will make the effort to articulate the realizations that blossomed that day, though in short form they were essentially Taoist in character. But at the time words were superfluous; a pervasive and convinced knowing filled me: heart, body, mind, and soul.

In the week since, I’ve held off writing anything specific about my experience. I’ve toyed with peripheral insights. Some I’ve already posted, and some will be placed on the blog in future weeks. All are vital to my growth, and convincing in light of my new understanding, so they need to be addressed. But the heart of the matter is so profound I am allowing it to mature. I want to avoid the ecstatic and grandiose writing that has sometimes found its way onto this site after my moments of inspiration. This experience was so profound and meaningful that it requires gentle treatment, like a fragile and sacred egg. It brought me to what seems like a broad and penetrating understanding of the human condition, and our relationship to nature. The scope of this new perspective crushes into triviality many of my prior concerns, including my imperative to rationally justify the existence of a ‘universal consciousness’. My plan of using linear thought to support faith now looks hopelessly naive. Although the intense mental effort that preceded this breakthrough probably opened the door, I now see that logic is not a reliable path to transcendence. The gates only open easily for those who surrender, abandon ego, and awaken to wonder.

In truth, the answers are as simple as they are profound. But even now I am skirting the core of the matter. I am warming up to writing about the week that started me on a new life, and I want to go slowly. I want to be sure my words are as free of ‘self’ as possible. The truths are universal. I did not earn them, and I do not want to despoil them by taking any credit, or by getting inflated with grandiosity. I have never felt so drawn to write about anything, or so cautious.

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A Truth Beyond Words was published on January 23rd, 2010, with these tags: , , . To date, this entry has received 6 comments.






Moving Forward

Sometimes the will needs to step in and help the spirit. My spirits have been low today, and I am trying to give them a pep talk. It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking the spirit is smarter than the mind: more wise, more able to see what is really important in life. But because the spirit is not analytical, and does not deal well with the concepts of  ’past’ and ‘future’, it can get confused by overwhelming feelings in the present. I find it vital that I prevent my mind from listening to the spirit when things start feeling bleak. Otherwise I have part of me suffering from negative emotions, and another part thinking about how bad things are. They feed off each other and spiral quickly into a dark place.

Instead, if I can keep the will, (i.e., the verbal mind), working hard to resist the pressure of darkness, it can help my spirit heal. For the spirit is tender and vulnerable. It needs the will to protect it. The will can be the strong partner at these times, holding the spirit’s hand (so to speak), helping it get past the pain. I like to look at the two as marriage partners, who work best when they play to each other’s strengths, and work together toward health.

There is a complicated ecology in the mind. Similar to the biological ecology that surrounds us, the mind has distinct components that are partly but not completely separate from one another. There is constant interplay and resource cycling. Thoughts affect feelings, and vice versa. The goal as I see it is to become a good steward to this system. Like a diligent gardener, I try to spot the weeds of sadness and negativity, keep the soil fertilized with good thoughts and positive feelings, and water well with creative ways of seeing things.

Does any of this make sense to anyone else? Do others pay attention to the different aspects of their own mind, and tend the interactions? I’d be interested to hear another’s thoughts.

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Moving Forward was published on June 10th, 2009, with these tags: , , , . To date, this entry has received no comments.