Spirituality and Mental Health
Any time my thing gets a little too much shtick about it, I get antsy, but this is something different. I am, definitely for the first time ever, taking what I might call a “mental-health-first” approach to my, you know, situation, and it is cutting to the quick in ways I am only familiar with from very high — and rare — doses of practice.
Some of the results are insights from analysis. For instance, my environment growing up didn’t provide a way for me to have anything that should be understood as a “health” problem. I was “high-functioning” and had every advantage, so my issues couldn’t have been things that required “treatment.” The only avenue for me was talk therapy; surely, someone could figure out what was bothering me that way.
So when it turned out that, no, they couldn’t, and neither could I, the conversions (the only remedy provided) just spiraled upwards and outwards, to the soul, the whole universe, et cetera. Spirituality brought me out to the places where nobody knew better than anyone else, because it was clear — again, according to the only frame allowed — that no one did.
And, then, 20 years of hard work in spiritual modalities helped me in enormous ways and made me who I am in every dimension. I don’t regret anything at all, and it will always be at the center of my life’s work.
And, also — when it comes to a pretty hot and dense core of emotional regulation issues just beginning to make their seriousness clear (to me) as my emotions take on a new importance as those of a father and husband do — spiritual modalities never really worked that well with that part.
I naturally gravitated towards spiritual practice modalities that were tuned to my temperament, seemingly there specifically to help with the suffering of being enslaved to overwhelming feelings, and even though it all sounded like just what the doctor ordered, it never actually did help with that very much. I mostly just felt like I must not have been doing it well enough.
As it turns out, that whole trip helps — a lot — with other problems, which I’ve written about exhaustively and feel very grateful to have learned about this way. Anxiety? Racing thoughts? Obsessive rumination? Sure. Drop that stuff in the hara and begone. But overstimulation and sensory issues? That feels like it has a brain chemistry component. Nowadays, I just need a little more help to stop yelling and freaking out at my family.
And apparently — now that I am an adult who has taken responsibility for himself and can just ask for the help I want — there are explanations for why I need so much help with that about which the evil idolatrous materialist machine matrix, I mean the Western medical establishment, might actually know some stuff? Like I might even be able to take medicine? Not plant medicine. I have been taking that stuff for ages. I mean pharmaceutical medicine.
But that’s not all. I hate to say it, but even some of their diet-Buddhist meditation instructions and shit are helping with this. Like, helping more than the kind I’ve done for thousands of hours. And do you want to know why? It’s because the person who taught it to me explained stuff about brains that I can’t even remember precisely because I was a bad biology student, but something like, “Various simple attentional exercises can engage the higher brain functions in the activity flooding the lower functions in moments of stress, which is key training for down-regulating and recovering agency when in crisis.”
I’m not saying I wish Sensei had told me that in the zendo. I’m saying it helps me to be told that by a doctor — or, you know, pseudo-doctor — who is also saying things like, “You have various traits that are part of the autism spectrum, and these particular exercises are shown to help people deal with those a little bit.”
The jury is still way, way out. On all of it. But I know the “return to the world” phase when I see it. Countless cultural frameworks describe this phase of the spiritual experience cycle, usually as the end of the cycle leading into a new one. It’s the part where you bring back the wisdom you gained in the Far Out and use it to fix things and help people.
In my experience of these, this has to extend to rejoining “consensus” vocabularies for aspects of human experience that people in more far-out parts of the cycle often seek to reject. You know, “psychology” words, or local “religious” words. Framings that help other people understand something about what someone is going through without requiring new faith commitments.
To return to the world after seeing through those as empty, I have repeatedly found it best to then put them on like a mask worn by the world — to see through them in that sense, as the eyes people inhabiting this world use to see each other.
I might say that the key insight of the spiritual experience cycle is that it is a cycle, and if you’re not going to come back to the life-world you were born into renewed by what you’ve learned — if you’re just going to run away and disappear — I reckon you can’t be said to have completed that cycle.
Don’t worry, we’ll go around again. In 10 years, I might have dreadlocks and be levitating in a cave jabbering like a baboon. But right now, I’m going to therapy, so that, God willing, I can do my weird stuff from an ever more integrated place.
