People often ask me why I can have a glass of red wine with dinner if I am a recovered addict. I tell them that substances are not the problem; the psychological state underlying the abuse is. Once I dealt with the underlying issues, and healed from them, the substances became irrelevant.

Like most things in our society, we need a huge revamping of how we look at the addiction and recovery model currently in use. Here is an interesting article on that very topic, and it closely resembles the path I chose.

As for other models, I just downloaded a program about a man with a chronic health disease who cured himself with alcohol, caffeine, and tobacco. You can be sure I’ll be reporting back on that one!

A recent Harvard study dovetails nicely into what Dr Gabor Mate has been asserting for years. In the words of the researchers themselves, “childhood abuse leads to permanent changes in a seahorse-shaped area of the brain that can cause adult depression and drug abuse.”

It also dovetails nicely into a recent surge of anecdotal evidence, namely that exercise can “reverse the damage by prompting the formation of new neurons in this part of the brain.”

The reason adults who come from abusive homes have similar symptoms to veterans returning from war is because of the similar effect of prolonged stress on human biology. In other words, there are events that we are not hardwired to live through, at least not without paying a heavy toll.

If you look at the symptoms of most modern disorders, they are identical to the symptoms of stress. This study proves that far from having a “disorder”, people suffering from depression and anxiety are having a completely natural response to having lived through events that have taken a toll on their bodies.

You can read the full article at Bloomberg.

In one hundred years, will the treatment of mental illness with a vast array of psychotropic drugs be seen as a success story, or a vast human tragedy?

When I was diagnosed with Bi Polar Disorder in my early twenties, I spent less than thirty minutes in the psychiatrist’s office where I was given a predetermined list of questions to answer. By the time I left, I had a prescription for Lithium in hand that I was told I would be on for the rest of my life.

Psychotropic drugs are dangerous chemical compounds. I know; I used them for many years. That is why they are either illegal or tightly controlled. Nobody really knows how they work, or what the long-term effects are. Suicide is listed among the many “side-effects” they can cause.

In an effort to widen the scope of possible patients, the industry has seen fit to target children. Children as young as two years old are being diagnosed with disorders and given prescriptions for one or more of these drugs. Nobody knows what the use of these chemicals will do to their developing brains over time. But what we do know is this:

-Over 300 million psychiatric drug prescriptions are written every year.
-The pharmaceutical industry brings in $80 Billion each year from the sale of these drugs.
-The top ten psychotropic drugs gross $26.5 Billion, more than double the amount of new money put into circulation each year by the United States Mint.
-Psychiatry today is a $330 Billion dollar a year industry, and has yet to find a single cure.

After being caught up in the Mental Health industry for twenty years, I am a true believer in informed consent. Here is an excellent documentary about topics covered in this post.

It has occurred to me on more than one occasion that insanity could be the antidote to culture. Perhaps people with a mental illness are tapping into something that the rest of us don’t and can’t see, not because we’re not capable of it, but because we are too programmed by the belief system of the dominant culture to perceive it. In other words, we are too distracted.
In Varieties of Religious Experience, William James offered his own interpretation on the matter. He believed that people suffering from these states were having a profound spiritual experience whose ultimate goal was to strengthen them in a way that nothing else could.
If this is true, then what we are doing when we intervene with drug therapy is we are taking away the crucible of the soul’s learning and whitewashing the connection to the void; wiping away the anxiety and torment of the moment, but also erasing the possibility for spiritual transformation.
I can’t prove it, and it could be total bullshit. But it has occurred to me on several occasions over the years that it could also be true.

Pink is the colour most associated with womanhood, femininity, glitz, glamour, and fun. It’s also used as a symbol for one of the deadliest diseases that kills countless women and men. I wouldn’t have a problem with this, except that the foundation in question seems to be a lot better at finding funding sources than it is at finding a cure for the disease. I recently looked up some statistics and this is what I found: the National Cancer Institute had a $5.1 billion budget for fiscal year 2010. There are more people making a living from cancer research and treatment in the U.S. than there are people dying from the disease every year. The typical American patient spends at least $50,000 on their cancer therapy. With one million new cancer patients each year in the U.S. that translates into $50 billion annual spent to treat cancer. That’s big money. And if there’s one thing I like to do as much as climb ice and write books, it’s to follow the money. (Note: I used the most conservative figures I could find for this post.)

Cancer is real, and so are the efforts of people who have lived or died through the disease, or have loved ones who have. These people often want to help out by raising money for cancer research. I have no problem with that. I simply have a problem with a foundation that has received so much money to find a cure, and has so far come up empty-handed (global cancer rates have doubled in the last three decades.)

Maybe it’s time to invest in some of the alternatives that have been ridiculed and/ or suppressed over the past few decades.

More importantly, maybe it’s time to put research money into finding and removing the toxic substances that are causing a large majority of these malignancies.

Queen’s professor Samantha King’s book, Pink Ribbons, Inc, has just been turned into a documentary film. I look forward to seeing her take on the subject.

I like to describe the void as “the insubstantial netherworld where you are trapped in your own grief and pain”. The void is not fun; but it is infinitely compelling. There are things you will learn from it that you could not learn from any other experience. But like Hades, you don’t want to get stuck there, and especially not for two decades.
I had a dream one night, which the Narrator called “The Land of the Mirror and Me.” In it, there was a mirror ball at the centre of the universe, and I was freely moving around it. Each time I moved, the myriad of tiny mirror fragments reflected different angles of my motion back to me. My takeaway from the dream was this: we are all just walking around experiencing reflections of ourselves everywhere. All of us; all at once.
The main problem with the void is how it feels: purposeless, meaningless, and hopeless. After twenty years of trying unsuccessfully to navigate it, I found the key to my release was its inverse: purpose, meaning, and hope. The trick was, these things did not exist, I had to find them inside myself and reflect them onto the canvas of nothingness. Not an easy task, as it turned out.
I realized during my time there that the void is the fundamental reality underlying the universe. Learning to interact with the void, to communicate with the void, and to play with the void was perhaps what my twenty years of mental illness were really all about. Nothing will take you into the void faster or more furiously than losing your grip on consensus reality. And therein lies the scary part: you must go in alone.
The void is a teacher and a healer; it is the fountain of all creative endeavours. To use an analogy, it is the space between the notes without which music would not exist.

There is a lot of finger pointing going on right now over the state of the economy. Governments blame the financial industry, banks blame the defaulted citizenry, and the citizens blame both. But the actual truth is that we all participated in this mess that we are now finding ourselves in. While it is true that investment banks never could have gone this far astray without government deregulation, it is also true that Wall Street could never have propagated these highly leveraged instruments without the money coming in from Main Street. That’s you, and that’s me.

When you put your money in one of the big banks, you are financing everything that they then do with that money. When you buy a stock on Wall Street, you are personally financing that company. If you have a pension or a mutual fund, even if you do not know what it is invested in, you are financing all of those companies with your energy.

The bottom line is that we, the folks on Main Street, have been financing Wall Street, its brokers and investment banks, all along. And we need to take responsibility for that. We also need to help our leaders make the changes that they need to make if we expect them to withdraw power from Wall Street. If we are to make a difference in these times and do our part, we must begin to align our actions with our beliefs, and we must re-engineer how the money works so that the criminal enterprises don’t get the vote of the people with their hard-earned dollars.

Things you can do:

Take your money out of the big banks and put it into a credit union or a small local bank
Invest in your own community
Do not buy stock in a company whose agenda is not in alignment with your beliefs

]]> http://www.allthatglittersbook.com/finger-pointing/feed/ 0 http://www.allthatglittersbook.com/lila/ http://www.allthatglittersbook.com/lila/#comments Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:24:05 +0000 Margo Talbot http://www.allthatglittersbook.com/?p=601

Robert M Pirsig is famous for having written Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974), but to my mind he wrote a much more powerful and significant book called Lila (1991). The premise of the book is basically this: why would you trust an expert’s opinion over your own direct experience?
This book had a huge effect on me, because when I read it I was in the middle of my battle with mental illness and addiction. There was no end of experts, either in books or in person, telling me how to “fix” the problem. I consider myself to have been bred with a healthy dose of distrust for such figures, and that in the end this trait turned out to be of great benefit to me.
When I look around today, I see a “crisis of experts”. From the government regulators who were supposed to be overseeing the investment banks, to the economists who “never saw it coming”, to a body of work called “science” that is proving to be as incomplete as the religions it seeks to usurp.
If I hadn’t learned it already, I would be learning it now: “expert facts” make a weaker brew of reality than “anecdotal evidence”.

The way I see it, what we are witnessing right now is nothing short of humanity’s collective shadow being unveiled. This is a good thing, because it shines the light of day on what has so far been kept in the closet and hidden in the sand. It is a necessary step if we are ever going to go beyond the greed and corruption that is systemic in this world, and create something better.

If anything has become apparent to me over the past five years it is this: we are on our own. There is no government agency or charismatic leader who will save us from the fruits of our actions. Our salvation is ours alone to make. To this end, it is everyone’s responsibility to confront their personal shadow, and do the work of freeing ourselves from its grip.

One of the most powerful tools I used to transform my life was to stop seeing myself as a victim and instead believing that I had created every challenge in my life as part of my spiritual journey. In this way, the very things that threatened to destroy me were used as stepping stones toward my own personal empowerment. There were three books that helped me to see this, and I will list them here in the order that I found them.

The Nature of Personal Reality by Jane Roberts

The Anatomy of the Spirit by Carolyn Myss

The Power of Now by Eckhartt Tolle

The biggest learning I got from these books is that there is nothing outside of me that is more powerful than me. A grandiose thought, I know, but the alternative was believing that an illegal substance had control over my entire existence, which if you think about it, is equally grandiose (for the substance, that is.)

Self esteem is not just a catch phrase in the self-help section of your local bookstore. It is your fundamental power, and an ally you don’t want to be navigating life without.

Feel free to let me know if you’ve got book titles of your own to add to my list!

Margo