WillSpirit!


∞ Where Mental Skills Heal Mental Ills ∞

A former physician writes about mental health and recovery using insights from life, science, and spiritual practice.








  • 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.


Short Term Problems, Long Term Progress

Ever feel like you’re not getting a point across?

Blog writing, at least as I practice it, is done on the fly. The essays are written quickly and revised only slightly beyond first draft. Sometimes the immediacy of the process obscures the intended message.

Many of this year’s posts have described my struggles, disappointments, sorrows, pains, and illnesses. Given that my goal is to write about life and growth using my own experience as illustration, it is only natural that setbacks prompt essays about difficulty. But the comments and emails I receive show that my larger perspective is not getting the attention it deserves.

It’s comforting to receive notes of sympathy and support. They help me feel that others listen and care. And yet, if my message was truly coming through, there would be more congratulation than commiseration.

Because the most striking fact of the past few months has been how little all these hardships get to me. Sure, I have moments of doubt and sorrow. In mentioning these, however, my hope has been to highlight the difference between how I’m responding now and how my tribulations would have affected me before. These days, I feel grief and pain flow through me at times, but my spirits stay fairly stable despite superficial complaints. In earlier years, my mind would have plunged into intractable depression and anxiety. With great relief, I’ve learned to watch life from the perspective of a deeper, broader, and more detached consciousness that doesn’t get pulled in.

I feel a clear separation between my transient emotions and my more enduring self. I can allow the feelings freedom to respond to life, but I watch them from a distance. I don’t, and can’t, take my suffering very seriously. Years of fostering meditative skills, spiritual grounding, and wise insight have led to this profound benefit. My quest has brought me to a state peacefulness I never could have imagined upon starting out.

As I work in the background on the book project mentioned earlier, I am feeling a sense of protectiveness toward that writing that seldom comes up in blogging. This larger work will demand careful editing before release. Online journaling has taught me how my unpolished language lets transient events obscure enduring truths. My book about mysticism and science needs to say its piece clearly and calmly, as if spoken from my most evolved mind; keeping that perspective in the foreground will require lots of rewriting. I hope to describe my position honestly, but with emphasis on realization rather than process.

Each approach has its advantages. I think the rawness of journaling appeals to certain readers, or else no blog would ever become popular. But the time is coming for me to clearly articulate a perspective on life that I’ve developed over decades. This can’t be done if it’s unduly influenced by the ups and downs of daily life. It needs to be written from that same perspective that is currently keeping me sane: broad, deep, accepting, and wise. I’ve gotten to the point where this viewpoint is always within reach, but it’s not always within my grasp, as recent posts have shown.

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Short Term Problems, Long Term Progress was published on April 15th, 2012 . 6 comments






Through a Tunnel, Into the Light

Today I had my sixth (or seventh?) Magnetic Resonance scan. This seems worth mentioning because for every previous MR study I’ve taken a sedative. Not today.

In the past my anxiety levels were high and the idea of being squeezed into a long, narrow tube felt terrifying. To slide into that device without a heavy dose of something like Valium felt inconceivable.

But nowadays my anxiety is less severe; and when it arises, it troubles me less. My meditative skills are solid. And I know better than to imagine the building bursting into flames with me stuck in the maw of the scanner.

So I kept my thoughts neutral, my body relaxed, my mind focused on my breathing, and my eyes closed. Everything went smoothly. The one difference I noticed was that the scan seemed to last a lot longer than before, even though in clock time it was actually shorter. Something about the lack of sedation altered my subjective sense of duration. Other than that, the MR was a breeze.

It’s nice to have this marker of progress. Another sign of change is how my recent depression lifted fairly quickly. Only four days after my announcing a fair amount of despair, I feel much better. Partly this is due to my new writing goals, proclaimed in the last essay. But I’ve watched similar quick recoveries several times of late. Events depress me, but I bounce back sooner. Over and over.

Don’t get me wrong: my moods still feel brittle. I’m sensitive and easily discouraged; there is considerable downward pressure on my spirits. But I feel more buoyant than in years past, when similar states of mind lasted longer and pulled me in deeper before resolving.

What makes the difference? Less obsessive focus on feeling state helps me function despite depression; the resultant activity keeps me from sinking into the abyss. More confidence that I can tolerate what happens in life reduces my levels of terror and anxiety. A broader perspective on my history reveals that many painful events that once felt like burdens actually taught me valuable lessons. Overall, we’re talking about vastly increased acceptance.

But there is something else, too. Call it Faith. My worldview now includes the certainty that the universe is running properly and my presence here has meaning. It’s this conviction that has me planning of a new direction for my writing. Having always defined myself as a biologist, I now also see myself as a mystic. I suppose that makes me a Mystic Biologist. I’m happy with this identity, which feels like my homeland. I look forward to realizing whatever potential comes with this embrace of self and destiny.

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Through a Tunnel, Into the Light was published on April 10th, 2012 . 6 comments






Proud to Fail

A comment left by Elaina, the author of the PTSD Is Normal blog, started me thinking about the meaning of failure.

Those of us with histories of difficult upbringings and unstable adult lives often find that success eludes us. We fail to see projects through, or we choose directions that demand skills we lack, or we trust people who undermine our progress, or we collapse emotionally when facing intensified stress, or we turn away from opportunities out of fear. Achievement, at least as it is usually defined, gets impeded by our poor coping skills and high reactivity.

And yet, a common gambit to compensate for low self-esteem is to become an overachiever. I started out like that. You don’t go to major universities, earn stellar grades, get advanced degrees, and train as a sub-specialty surgeon unless you feel pretty driven to succeed. My attainments in younger years helped me feel better about myself, but they never penetrated to the inner core of my personality that was corrupted by the virus of self-hatred. I looked good on paper and never hesitated to let people know about my high-status profession, but it was all in service of counteracting deep feelings of worthlessness.

When neck disease made my overloaded operating schedule too demanding to continue, I rather precipitously abandoned my career. This rash decision came during a manic episode back before I knew myself capable of losing control in that way. So I didn’t recognize the warning signs. Rather than working patiently to solve the mismatch between my workload and spinal vulnerability (for instance by reducing to half-time), I just gave up on a career that had required ten years of medical training beyond college and graduate school. That decision led to many negative consequences, some of which continue to plague me.

In many ways, the recent acupuncture fiasco showed history repeating itself. I chose a career path that was obviously going to be very difficult for me. I listened to advice rather than my own heart. I trusted people who proved untrustworthy. My physical health deteriorated under stress. And I even made the decision to abandon the project while in a fit of mania (though now that the dust has settled I have no doubt about the correctness of that choice).

On the one hand, I could mine the acupuncture saga for tips on how to choose my goals more wisely. Or I could reassure my ego by seeing that in some ways the project was successful despite its failure in the business sense. For instance, many of my patients felt dramatically better after I’d treated them. And educating myself and setting up a practice taught me a great deal about healing, Chinese medicine, and Eastern philosophy, not to mention business realities and my own temperament.

But the most valuable outcome was my realizing that external circumstances are more or less irrelevant to internal progress. I do not need to prove my worth to the world at large; I only need to find value in myself. The highest goal in life, as I now see it, is to learn to feel satisfied and enriched by living no matter what happens. Failure, illness, pain, and grief are just as valuable to a soul as their opposites. A diet of only disappointment would certainly get tiresome, but the Self could be sustained by it if properly schooled. If it teaches us these attitudes, failure proves itself as valuable as success, and possibly more so.

The Buddha saw this truth long ago in speaking of the eight worldly winds: Praise/Blame, Gain/Loss, Fame/Shame, and Happiness/Despair. He saw that a person can rise beyond these dialectics and find peace of mind no matter the vagaries of Fate’s gales.

The edifying value of failure is perhaps a needed lesson in today’s success-obsessed world. Certainly, I feel much happier knowing that my life does not need validation from conventional sources. It can be experienced as meaningful even when it looks unfortunate from the outside. Knowing this, and seeing how my career catastrophes have taught me an invaluable lesson, I feel proud to have failed.

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Proud to Fail was published on April 1st, 2012 . 10 comments






Death and Rebirth, on an Absurdly Small Scale

Our acupuncture office has closed, officially and permanently. As we acceded to the inevitable, fortune smiled on us, in that another physician acupuncturist liked the space and assumed the lease. He also purchased some of the furnishings and equipment, which was helpful financially but also saved us the trouble of moving and storing heavy items.

Breaking down the office my wife and I worked so hard to set up made me sad, but at least there wasn’t much doubt about the decision. The business had been struggling from the get-go, and the many problems had stressed us both. After hospitalization I was left with a new source of pain (in my abdomen), worsened neck problems, limited use of my left arm due to nerve compression, and heightened psychiatric instability. Continuing to practice with so many impairments would have been impossible and also unethical, so finding someone to take over the space felt like a Godsend.

Oddly, it hurt even more when I revised my acupuncture website (this link will eventually be deactivated, but it’s good for now) to announce the practice closure. I’d invested a great deal of time in building up the site’s design and content. Posting an announcement to kill the project left me a bit shaken. But I see a positive aspect to this response: it shows how much I enjoy fussing with websites and how much creative energy such work absorbs.

It’s part of the reason I’m planning a big reorganization and upgrade to this blog’s format. The initial template that I chose in 2009 has long since been abandoned by its developers. I’ve been adjusting and altering it for years, and I’ve managed to keep it functioning, but there are many glitches and I lack the expertise to fix them. So WillSpirit will be moving to a new and more robust template soon.

The updated appearance will be less quirky and more pedestrian; it will look like a typical website. I’ll miss the old format, but change cannot be avoided, especially in technological realms.

I am currently organizing the archived posts into categories. The old Tag Cloud system is also being revised and is currently disabled. I apologize for that inconvenience, by the way, though I’ve never believed tags all that helpful for finding pieces of relevance. My goal is to make the new site a place where people can more easily find articles pertaining to their needs and goals.

So, in summary, a treasured but difficult and failing project has ended. This frees up time for me to further develop WillSpirit, which requires attention anyway. One endeavor ending, another reviving. Life moves forward.

On balance, I feel better about all this than expected. The acupuncture practice was supposed to improve our financial situation, but it actually ended up costing a great deal and did not appear destined to become very profitable. The answer to our budget issues appears to be ever-increasing frugality, especially as prices continue to rise. But one gains a spiritual boon in learning to get by with less, so I’m OK with tightening the purse strings.

I’m OK with everything these days: the new pains, the new sorrows, the ongoing uncertainty, the new directions. Through all this uproar my sensitive soul keeps learning. For instance, it’s nice to finally feel convinced that life doesn’t need to be comfortable to be valuable. I embrace it all, come what may.

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Death and Rebirth, on an Absurdly Small Scale was published on March 26th, 2012 . 23 comments






Surviving Two Days of Depression

Saturday and Sunday were hard for me: depression and frustration. In the ‘old’ days, I would have been flat-out miserable. These days, however, I am able to tolerate the ‘down’ feelings without believing it to be torture. There are two good movements that support the idea that depressed moods don’t have to be hateful: Acceptance and Commitment Therapy, and Tom Wootton’s Bipolar Advantage. I suggest checking out both. They helped me sit with my depression and experience it without judgement. I found that there is physical pain, especially in my chest/heart area, but also throughout my whole body. There is a sense of melancholy, and it is difficult to feel excited about anything. However, I also feel a kind of ‘wisdom,’ a way of seeing the world that transcends ordinary values. If you can learn to be OK with depression, then you are freer than before. You can see how so much of what people run away from (and sometimes spend their whole lives avoiding) can actually be growth-enhancing.

So I got through those rough days. So far today feels lighter, but it is not even 7 am in California yet, so there is still plenty of time for that to change. Either way, however, I will be fine.

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Surviving Two Days of Depression was published on June 22nd, 2009 . 4 comments






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