Communication Counts!

As we move into the dark time of the year, the sun sinks lower, leaves fall from the trees, and nights grow long and cold.  It’s easy to feel depressed.  But this article is not about SAD (Seasonal Affective Disorder).  It’s about how to be truly present, and in that way perhaps be able to help a seriously depressed loved one.

There’s a huge difference between clinical depression and simply feeling “down.”  Clinical depression often requires professional treatment.  But in our everyday world, a person with any form of depression, whether clinical or non-clinical, can respond to empathy.  Real empathy doesn’t try to fix,  downplay, or remove the pain our loved one may be feeling. It simply holds the space for that person to express whatever needs to be expressed.  We may not have a solution, but we can still be there for our family member or friend, and often that alone helps.

My first teacher at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology, Kate Wolf-Pizor, used to say “What people need is a good listening to!”  Listening from the heart is a skill that may take some time and patience to develop, but it’s well worth the effort.  If we can let go of our own agenda– even though we’re very worried about our loved one– and simply listen, we can do a world of good.

Scientists have found that memories may be passed down through generations in our DNA

http://soulsurfing.website/index.php/2015/10/13/scientists-have-found-that-memories-may-be-passed-down-through-generations-in-our-dna/

 

Jesus was a shaman.  

These words open the mind to the realization that the man known as the Son of God was still, in fact, a man– as human as you and I, as strong and fragile, as vulnerable to all the challenges we face from day to day, as capable of love and anger and yearning and joy as each of us.  Yet his life, death, and post-mortem appearances to his followers have inspired  people around the world for over 2000 years.  Despite multiple interpretations (and misinterpretations) of his teachings by Christians and others, we remain mystified, intrigued   

What makes a shaman different from other men?  How can any human being, shaman or not, suffer, die, and rise again?  A true shaman is also an adept–  one who has made friends with death, who no longer fears anything that can possibly happen, because she has mastered the ego.  The Uhane, the Middle Self– that part of us that fears, hopes, desires, angers, plans, and generally drives us crazy with self-absorption and endless striving– no longer rules her fate.  She knows she is more than what she appears to be.  The extent to which we can see that we are not just our bodies– these packets of bone and flesh–  but pure Spirit, is the extent to which we, too, can become as free as Jesus was. 

Jose’ Stevens’ latest article explores the themes of Christ’s Crucifixion, Resurrection, and Ascension from a shamanic point of view.  He explains the real meaning behind the saga of Jesus, and encourages us to consider that we too can enjoy our lives to the full, knowing that life in the body is a dream and that we, like Jesus, are the dreamweavers. 

Jose’ Stevens – July 2014

Barring the unforeseen, we can usually deal with most mini medical emergencies on our own. But every now and then something happens to blow that theory right out of the water. In my husband’s case, he had some soreness in his hip so he couldn’t sleep on his side, as usual. Trying to sleep on his back didn’t work, and after about a week of sleepless nights and a series of over the counter herbal sleep products, he’d become a bit panicky and decided to head over to Urgent Care for a prescription. At that point I should have put my foot down, but I didn’t. (A week with a sleepless, panicky man can definitely put one off her game!) In any case, the obliging young PA gave him a prescription for an anti-anxiety drug which was supposed to help with insomnia. It didn’t. Neither did the next one, or the one after that. My husband woke me up at 5 am one morning about three weeks into this protocol to say he was having terrifying hallucinations and I’d better drive him to the hospital. I did, and the ER team were wonderful. The MD in charge was only to happy to send him home with a week’s worth of Lorazepam, which he took gratefully, and things settled down somewhat. All too soon, however, anxiety set in again. (My husband is a Vietnam vet with PTSD, so anxiety is a constant– but it was usually very low-level until we jumped on the Pill Train.) Lorazepam was again prescribed, along with a few other meds the doctors convinced him to take. (By now he had seen several doctors, including two GPs, a couple of psychologists, and no less than three psychiatrists– all to to avail. Each of the meds produced an opposite reaction to the one intended– so that an anti-anxiety med created anxiety. A sleeping med caused insomnia. Meds for other accompanying physical symptoms intensified those symptoms. So he would briefly try one after the other, sinking ever deeper into despair and convinced that he could never heal. About six months after his first visit to the ER he thought he was having a heart attack– which turned out to be a panic attack– and I took him back to the hospital. Again, a wonderful team took care of him, kept him there overnight, and finally released him the next afternoon with a long list of various meds they felt he should take. This time, however, we decided to read the scary information the pharmacy gives you with SSRIs and other psychoactive drugs. It was no surprise to learn that every one of his symptoms were either caused by or exacerbated by the drugs he’d been prescribed.

It’s been almost two years since the onset of this adventure and my husband now eats organic food, takes only herbal supplements, and works with his issues through meditation and other calming and centering practices. He’s slowly recovering some of his physical strength and mental acuity. (The drugs, we discovered, also induce brain fog, flat affect, and delayed neurophysical reaction along with everything else.) And though it’s a grueling process, with a few bright moments and many dark ones, he is beginning to heal.

If there’s a moral to this story, it’s that we really need to follow our intuition– listen to that still, small voice that whispers, “Maybe this isn’t such a great idea. Maybe you might want to try another way…” Ideally, the billions that are being thrown at Big Pharm could be used to fund research on the real effects of psychoactive medications. More research on holistic treatment of serious mental and emotional disorders is definitely in order. At the very least we need to look more deeply into underlying causes of our depression, anxiety, insomnia, or whatever else we may be facing. There is always a reason, because the body is not our enemy. It’s our friend, and when unpleasant thoughts or physical symptoms arise they’re not just coming out of the blue. There is always a wiser, gentler way to deal with life’s little roadblocks.

Cherry Hill Seminary Releases “Don’t Look Away”
Recognizing & Responding to Abuse for Non-Professionals

In response to growing concern about accountability in our communities, Cherry Hill Seminary has released a free media presentation called “Don’t Look Away: Recognizing & Responding to Abuse for Non-professionals.”

“Don’t Look Away” was created to help individuals and small groups better understand the nature of sexual abuse and appropriate ways to respond, as well as what to do if you have been abused, yourself. Numerous resources are given, such as the National Child Traumatic Stress Network, National Child Traumatic Stress Network, National Domestic Violence Hotline, and others.

The presentation also references a newEmergency Resources page on the Cherry Hill Seminary web site. The page is a quick reference, not only on sexual abuse, but on domestic violence, addictions, child and elder abuse and neglect, mental health, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).

“So many of us, unless we are a professional trained in such matters, don’t really know what to do or not do when we are confronted with possible abuse,” said Executive Director Holli Emore. “For far too long, we have either not recognized the signs of abuse among us, or we have looked away, assuming, hoping, that someone else will take care of the problem. But those problems don’t go away by themselves.”

Don’t Look Away is intended for a general, public audience; that is, it is not a scholarly piece. It is simple, direct and to the point. The additional resource links enable the viewer to pursue further information, if they wish. Cherry Hill Seminary also offers extensive coursework in ethics, pastoral counseling, and related issues.

Feel free to share Don’t Look Away widely. You are asked not to change the content, and to credit Cherry Hill Seminary as the creator. For more information, visit www.cherryhillseminary.org.

 

 

 

The DSM-5, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, emerged last June after over 10 years of concerted effort on the part of hundreds of mental health clinicians in every field.  This Herculean effort was sponsored by the APA and WHO and included a 28-member task force, a work group of 130 members and a 400- member advisory group.  Mental health practitioners are just beginning to use it with some reservations, because this 947-page tome has renamed some categories of mental disorders, combined others, eliminated quite a few, and created new ones.  Many clinicians feel that this further complicates the use of an already extremely confusing resource while others hail it as the new Bible of Mental Health.

Regardless of which side of the fence one chooses, the DSM-5 will continue in use for “at least another decade” according to a New York Times article that followed its release, republished here:

Psychiatry’s Guide Is Out of Touch With Science, Experts Say
By Pam Belluck and Benedict Carey
Reprinted from The New York Times, May 6, 2013
Just weeks before the long-awaited publication of a new edition of the so-called bible of mental disorders, the federal government’s most prominent psychiatric expert has said the book suffers from a scientific “lack of validity.”

The expert, Dr. Thomas R. Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said in an interview Monday that his goal was to reshape the direction of psychiatric research to focus on biology, genetics and neuroscience so that scientists can define disorders by their causes, rather than their symptoms.

While the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or D.S.M., is the best tool now available for clinicians treating patients and should not be tossed out, he said, it does not reflect the complexity of many disorders, and its way of categorizing mental illnesses should not guide research.

“As long as the research community takes the D.S.M. to be a bible, we’ll never make progress,” Dr. Insel said, adding, “People think that everything has to match D.S.M. criteria, but you know what? Biology never read that book.”

The revision, known as the D.S.M.-5, is the first major reissue since 1994. It has stirred unprecedented questioning from the public, patient groups and, most fundamentally, senior figures in psychiatry who have challenged not only decisions about specific diagnoses but the scientific basis of the entire enterprise. Basic research into the biology of mental disorders and treatment has stalled, they say, confounded by the labyrinth of the brain.

Decades of spending on neuroscience have taught scientists mostly what they do not know, undermining some of their most elemental assumptions. Genetic glitches that appear to increase the risk of schizophrenia in one person may predispose others to autism-like symptoms, or bipolar disorder. The mechanisms of the field’s most commonly used drugs — antidepressants like Prozac, and antipsychosis medications like Zyprexa — have revealed nothing about the causes of those disorders. And major drugmakers have scaled back psychiatric drug development, having virtually no new biological “targets” to shoot for.

Dr. Insel is one of a growing number of scientists who think that the field needs an entirely new paradigm for understanding mental disorders, though neither he nor anyone else knows exactly what it will look like.

Even the chairman of the task force making revisions to the D.S.M., Dr. David J. Kupfer, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh, said the new manual was faced with doing the best it could with the scientific evidence available.

“The problem that we’ve had in dealing with the data that we’ve had over the five to 10 years since we began the revision process of D.S.M.-5 is a failure of our neuroscience and biology to give us the level of diagnostic criteria, a level of sensitivity and specificity that we would be able to introduce into the diagnostic manual,” Dr. Kupfer said.

The creators of the D.S.M. in the 1960s and ’70s “were real heroes at the time,” said Dr. Steven E. Hyman, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist at the Broad Institute and a former director at the National Institute of Mental Health. “They chose a model in which all psychiatric illnesses were represented as categories discontinuous with ‘normal.’ But this is totally wrong in a way they couldn’t have imagined. So in fact what they produced was an absolute scientific nightmare. Many people who get one diagnosis get five diagnoses, but they don’t have five diseases — they have one underlying condition.”

Dr. Hyman, Dr. Insel and other experts said they hoped that the science of psychiatry would follow the direction of cancer research, which is moving from classifying tumors by where they occur in the body to characterizing them by their genetic and molecular signatures.

About two years ago, to spur a move in that direction, Dr. Insel started a federal project called Research Domain Criteria, or RDoC, which he highlighted in a blog post last week. Dr. Insel said in the blog that the National Institute of Mental Health would be “reorienting its research away from D.S.M. categories” because “patients with mental disorders deserve better.” His commentary has created ripples throughout the mental health community.

Dr. Insel said in the interview that his motivation was not to disparage the D.S.M. as a clinical tool, but to encourage researchers and especially outside reviewers who screen proposals for financing from his agency to disregard its categories and investigate the biological underpinnings of disorders instead. He said he had heard from scientists whose proposals to study processes common to depression, schizophrenia and psychosis were rejected by grant reviewers because they cut across D.S.M. disease categories.

“They didn’t get it,” Dr. Insel said of the reviewers. “What we’re trying to do with RDoC is say actually this is a fresh way to think about it.” He added that he hoped researchers would also participate in projects funded through the Obama administration’s new brain initiative.

Dr. Michael First, a psychiatry professor at Columbia who edited the last edition of the manual, said, “RDoC is clearly the way of the future,” although it would take years to get results that could apply to patients. In the meantime, he said, “RDoC can’t do what the D.S.M. does. The D.S.M. is what clinicians use. Patients will always come into offices with symptoms.”

For at least a decade, Dr. First and others said, patients will continue to be diagnosed with D.S.M. categories as a guide, and insurance companies will reimburse with such diagnoses in mind.

Dr. Jeffrey Lieberman, the chairman of the psychiatry department at Columbia and president-elect of the American Psychiatric Association, which publishes the D.S.M., said that the new edition’s refinements were “based on research in the last 20 years that will improve the utility of this guide for practitioners, and improve, however incrementally, the care patients receive.”

He added: “The last thing we want to do is be defensive or apologetic about the state of our field. But at the same time, we’re not satisfied with it either. There’s nothing we’d like better than to have more scientific progress.”

A version of this article appeared in print on May 7, 2013, on page A13 of the New York edition with the headline: Psychiatry’s New Guide Falls Short, Experts Say.

 

Tomorrow, May 1,  is Beltane– the Pagan festival of fecundity, the time of fertilization.  In the old days, countrymen and women would lie together in the fields to encourage the beasts to bear, and the crops to grow strong and provide food for all.  It didn’t matter whom you chose for a partner– on this day all boundaries ceased to exist, all ties were broken, all bets were off.  What mattered was that you peformed this holy rite because if you didn’t, the people would starve.

Today, many in our puritanical Western culture find public displays of sexual affection lewd (and in some places illegal).  But Beltane is still an opportunity to celebrate physicality, to rejoice in the body–  animal body,  human body, body of the Earth Herself– to worship the sensual in all its many manifestations. The whole of Nature thrills to this swelling, bursting, outpouring of pure love!   We are seduced by buds on apple trees, bright and tender new grass, birdsong filling the morning and evening with hymns of praise and the joy of being alive, gentle breezes that caress our face and body, scents of loam and flowers, and movements of tiny insects scurrying from place to place as they rediscover mobility and purpose after winter’s cold.  And color!  Soft blush of cherry blossoms and deeper rose pink of hawthorn, royal purple of iris and yellow daffodils, periwinkle blue and forsythia gold– and above all green!  Green— the color of life and hope!

Woman– the Divine Feminine– is the High Priestess of the sacred Beltane rites.  Although we may identify as female, male, transgender, or other, we each carry this precious feminine energy inside us.  So whether or not you choose to lie in the fields (with or without a partner), by all means do choose to honor the Divine Feminine in whatever ways you can imagine.

Ava Park, High Priestess of the Goddess Temple of Orange County, notes that Woman as Queen must care for herself, must enjoy herself, even pamper herself– for when She is fulfilled and content, the people prosper, the crops grow, all are fed and cared for, all is well in the Kingdom.  No matter if your “kingdom” is an office, a classroom, a home, a vehicle, or someplace else, It will prosper if you care for yourself.

For many of us this is the most difficult thing we’ve ever tried to do.  Considering how many years I’ve spent in the role of Woman-as-Caretaker, Woman-as-Worker, Woman-as-Mother-Daughter-Sister-Wife, Woman-as-Martyr I’m amazed I’m still alive to tell the tale!  But that was expected of young girls back then– I would grow up, marry some nice man, and follow the protocol.  No one EVER suggested that I pamper myself!

So, how do we do this?  We may not be able to afford to visit an expensive spa,  fly to the Bahamas, or buy an elegant gown.  But we can and must devise some way of honoring the Goddess within.  Perhaps lunch with our BGF, or a leisurely cup of coffee at our favorite coffee spot (in Berkeley mine was Original Peet’s, and here in Santa Fe it’s Downtown Subscription– I love their patio!).  Maybe  a solitary walk in a nearby park, or an afternoon spent reading a favorite book (with all the techno-wonders turned off).  Maybe purchasing that lipstick or eyeshadow you’ve been wanting to try.    Maybe bringing a special flower or bouquet into your home.  (No matter how overwhelmed I may feel, when I bring  fresh flowers for my altar and my favorite antique vase, I am instantly rejuvenated and inspired.)  Maybe just a lovely, sensuous, candle-lit soak in the tub before bed,   (If you choose this option, Sarva Soaps is the way to go!)

Whatever we choose to do, we must do it with a sense of the ritual meaning behind it.

I am Goddess.  I am the Source of Life.  All that I do to nurture myself nurtures others.  I deserve this gift of reverence.  I claim it.  I open my arms and my heart and welcome it.  I inhabit it.

Jose Stevens, of the Power Path, has a wonderful MP3 on Manifestation that offers a 4-step path to manifesting what you most deeply want in your life.  I’ve tried it and it works!  But manifestation practice (via MP3 or any other means) is not the secret.  First we have to realize how holy we are.  We are not slugs inching along an inexorable path towards death.  We are not work-slaves.  We are not procreation machines.  We are so much more that any of these!   We are Woman-and-Goddess!  And as the Charge of the Goddess states,

Let My worship be in the heart that rejoices, for behold, all acts of love and pleasure are My rituals.

I honor those whose work has inspired me to write this blog:  Starhawk, Doreen Virtue, Ava Park, and last but definitely not least, Jose Stevens.

http://www.reclaiming.org/about/witchfaq/charge.html

Blessed be!