Category: psychology

reflections from Indra’s Net, etc.

in habits I trust

With my room in a flu(mmo)x of books, towers of dishevelled documents, magazines, unhung decorations and an underwear drawer down to its last pair of trunks … I would have said previously that things are in disarray, but now I see that things are in a formative state ~ and that things, all things always, are in a formative state, as in always forming and reforming, never settling into one state or another, and as I type this I feel the relief that comes with beginning to know this at a deeper and deeper experiential level.1

I am still settling in at home, and I feel I have the time to be patient because there is a relatively secure future here. (I say “relative” because who knows what might happen.) Also I trust myself and the universe and I feel the universe trusts me because it senses that I am sensing that I am it.

I am of the universe in the same way a wave is of the ocean, not separate.

I deepen into becoming an instrument of this divine oceanic reality, and I am equipped to accommodate anything that happens, whether I like what happens or not.

I realised recently that I am not the boss of reality and I have been saying this jokingly to friends, but I mean it. [5.55]

Reality is the boss, and there is very little I can do to influence the untold number of events that unfold on its watch. But I watch what I can, and what I can influence is how I respond to events. By training myself to respond constructively to everything I observe, I form new mental, emotional and behavioural habits that are more and more wholesome every day.

In habits I trust.

I am piecing together some ideas that interest me very much about the (w)holistic importance of being responsible for my (and only my) mental, emotional and behavioural habits.

These ideas are grounded in the #dharma, sustained by near-constant mindfulness and #meditation in all action, and increasingly backed by #neuroscience, which makes me feel all boisterous and joyful because these ideas (when and only when applied) lead inexorably to the experience of something called sukkha (in Buddhism, and probably many other things in the world’s many spiritual traditions), which means “genuine happiness”.

Not fleeting happiness, not pleasure conflated with happiness.

Genuine, abiding contentment with all that is, without the overlay of judgement saying, “This is good, now I am happy,” or “This is bad, now I am unhappy.”

These (w)holistic ideas about personal responsibility have profound implications for collective wellbeing and long-term sustainability (a healthy world arises out of healthy minds) but their application does start with the individual. If the individual is lucky (as I am) to meet with what we all deserve, they will have the support of a community that understands these implications at least on some level,

and this collective support is what turns individual awareness and responsibility into a bonafide superpower. #sangha

These ideas have some very cool names … Indra’s Net (thanks Marc) … the morphogenetic field or morphic resonance (thanks Rupert Not Murdoch) … the holographic universe (thanks Einstein, Michael Talbot, et. al.), the #dharma … and are exemplified by the saying, “A rising tide lifts all boats” (thanks Pierce ~ may we discover together that JFK did indeed lift this from the Bible, and that maybe the Flood is actually a metaphor about a time in Biblical history when a flood of awakening wiped out swathes of ignorance in the psyche of humankind, because we know … or at least, strongly suspect … these episodes of collective awakening come in waves through history and can never really be talked about directly, so: metaphor to the rescue).

I don’t have the time or the desire to elaborate further on these ideas at the moment, because I have a group meditation to attend in 9 … 8 minutes. For now it will be enough to share the Serenity Prayer.

May I ask you to leave your notes below ~ as always, my intention for sharing these thoughts is to stimulate dialogue. If public dialogue is not your jam, get in touch directly here. If commenting on WordPress is a laborious chore because you don’t already have an account, please share this post with your comments on the socials, because it’s a dialogue we sorely need to help us transition from the doldrums of modern civilisation into whatever form is next.

  1.  I say “flu(mmo)x” because the confusion comes from within me (who is flux), not from within the state of my room, which is also in flux, but not necessarily confusing. ↩︎

on Exercising my Right to Hold a Shonky GP Accountable

I am submitting a complaint to the Office of the Health Ombudsman today, after a shonky GP tried to swindle me into what I am calling “tic-tacs for kick-backs”, meaning anti-depressants I don’t want or need.

I have been meaning to do this for a while, but have had so much other shit going on lately (mostly good shit), but after a second sleepless night filled with pre-occupations about said shit, I decided while making coffee that this is what I would spend my pre-meditation time doing, because:

  1. maybe it will leaven the burden of carrying this complaint-intention around and begin to lift the resentment I feel every time I remember that this situation happened
  2. as a bystander and citizen, I feel a duty to report this knuckle-head so that other vulnerable people might not become his prey in future
  3. after doing this I might be able to start working on letting-go of some of the shit language I use to think about and describe this fellow, who I understand is just trying to find happiness, albeit in the “wrong objects”, namely, financial wealth ~ and then sometime later I might be able to start opening myself to more-generous assumptions through the diligent application of forgiveness

I was going to link here to my Google Review of this GP, but for now I think it’s prudent to not point so blatantly at his privacy (does he get the benefit of privacy if he is running a public private practice?), lest I pull an avalanche of defamation bullshit onto my own head.

I am so legally naive that I don’t even know the differences between things like defamation and slander. My intention here is not to unnecessarily injure this GPs reputation, but to make people aware that they might want to exercise caution if approaching this GP. I formerly identified as something of a citizen journalist, and this activity and post is I guess a hangover from those days.

I am not going to post here my cautionary-tale Google Review, but I am going to post my (de-identified) complaint to the ombudsman, because I’m curious to know what others think of the reasoning I’m doing here.

I am 99% convinced that this bloke has a whole-arse method that he rolls out whenever he sees a vulnerable person walk into his clinic, and yet I am clinging desperately to the idea of holding my convictions tentatively because:

  1. I like what Bertrand Russell said about not being opinionated
    1. The essence of the liberal outlook lies not in what opinions are held, but in how they are held: instead of being held dogmatically, they are held tentatively, and with a consciousness that new evidence may at any moment lead to their abandonment.
  2. I want to retain my belief, for now, that humans are inherently good, despite this illuminating post I found on Twitter recently, which challenged this belief in a way that sounds legit

So here is the guts of the complaint:

I am new to the Logan/Springwood area, and needing a new regular GP, I went to Dr Doo-not-much for sleep support, expecting a melatonin prescription perhaps.

He tried to prescribe me anti-depressants, without answering my questions about what the prescription actually was (I had to ask a nearby pharmacist to explain what he had prescribed me).

I also asked to start a Mental Health Care Plan (which I maintain with all my GPs as a preventative measure) and he tried to tell me that a MHCP was pointless because I would just get “talk therapy” and what I really needed was a diagnosis.

This is untrue ~ my last MHCP therapist is a Somatic Experiencing practitioner, but Dr Doo-not-much wouldn’t listen to my experience of finding my own Medicare registered therapists.

He referred me to a nearby psychiatrist, and explained to me that he has a “deal” with them to get cheap diagnoses.

The biggest red flag though: on my second and final appointment, Dr Doo-not-much knocked a whole stack of inbox trays off his desk and proceeded to blame everything except his own elbow for the stack falling.

This guy is super dodgy, and really shouldn’t be practising. If he cannot accept accountability for knocking something off his desk, how can I trust him to be responsible for the known side-effects of the powerful pharmaceuticals he tried to swindle me into taking!?

He told me to take those anti-depressants (without telling me that’s what they were) for a couple of weeks until my sleep stabilised!

If I hadn’t had the wherewithal to enquire with the pharmacist or the confidence to self-advocate, I would have been sucked into this guy’s ruse to get me hooked on anti-depressants for kickbacks, and would have had to taper.

I have been managing depression symptoms for 20+ years with lifestyle changes and have never needed pharmaceutical medication.

I know my health history, and I know my needs.

This guy was so frenetic and conceited that he wouldn’t listen to me when I tried to tell him I know my own history of recovery from mental illness.

He has also not released my results from tests performed for a foot injury after nearly 3 weeks of waiting after another GP requested them.

I am genuinely concerned that this guy is harming patients by prescribing them anti-depressants without proper education: if he prescribed them to me within 2 visits, without conducting so much as a mental-health questionnaire, then who else is he prescribing them to!

On the complaint form the Office of the Health Ombudsman ask “What do you want to happen?”, so I said:

I would like Dr Doo-not-much to be investigated to see what he means by having a “deal” with a local psychiatrist, because if this man is funneling people through a dodgy psychiatrist to get them diagnosed and prescribed unnecessary pharmaceuticals for profit, then this is serious malpractice and he could be causing a lot of short- and long-term harm for his own financial gain.

And I am attaching a second PDF with the formal complaint form, documenting reflections that occurred to me after completing that form:

I went to Dr Doo-not-much for both sleep support and to start investigating why my foot injury was still giving me trouble after getting stitches for a laceration resulting from stepping on a sharp rock. 

When I told him the symptoms (pain and swelling, some months after the stitches were removed) he tried to prescribe me anti-biotics before even beginning to print the referral for blood tests that I had asked for, to see if there was an infection.

I informed Dr Doo-not-much that I was reluctant to take anti-biotics unless absolutely necessary. When he asked me why, I informed him that I didn’t want to mess with my gut bacteria unnecessarily.

Dr Doo-not-much brushed this off, and told me that anti-biotics were a good preventative measure against infection. 

A preventative measure against infection forming inside a wound that had already healed on the outside?

This just didn’t make sense to me, and after completing the accompanying PDF I began to suspect that this might be part of Dr Doo-not-much’s nefarious method: prescribe anti-biotics to ruin a patient’s gut bacteria, making them susceptible to depression, and attempting to render them dependent on powerful mind-altering pharmaceuticals by simultaneously prescribing them anti-depressants. 

I am trying (not very hard) to avoid emotive language here, but the truth is I felt and still feel that my trust was profoundly violated by this doctor, and I am genuinely concerned that he is rolling out this method on the daily to people who are less able to self-advocate than I am. 

I have been similarly coerced in psychiatric wards and it’s just really not cricket ~ this kind of practice is profoundly unethical and harmful, and I hope that this complaint will be investigated thoroughly by an objective party who is not so thoroughly embroiled emotionally in whatever is going down at this GP clinic. 

I am genuinely open to suggestions that I am just being paranoid here, but I am equally open to hearing whether others observing this post would draw the same conclusions from the behaviours I observed.

I know that “tic-tacs for kick-backs” is a thing, but I always held the belief that something like this would never happen to me.

Let me know in the comments below, or contact me directly through this website or the socials.

Much appreciated if you got this far through the post!

releasing attachment trauma through mindfulness of the body

This podcast!

“Top Down and Bottom Up Processing: How Our Mind Creates Our Sense of Self and the World and How to Restart the Process” by Josh Korda, Dharmapunx teacher and Buddhist chaplain

we (unconsciously) attract and are attracted to romantic partners because their loving style is similar
to what we learned to expect in our upbringing ~ mindfulness of the body interrupts that unhealthy cycle … if we want to become conscious, we have to go through the body.

In this podcast, Josh describes the psychological mechanism that causes us to choose partners who replicate the loving style of our caregivers, regardless of course, whether that loving style was healthy or not.

I have wondered for soooooo many years, why do we attract and feel attracted to partners who are just like our parents? This is a whole phenomenon in the psychology world. Some say we are able to heal our attachment traumas in and through these relationships we attract because of this patterning mechanism that Korda describes. But we all know of someone who continues attracting an abusive partner and we’re all standing around watching this train wreck happening yet the person can’t see it coming. That person might be ourself.

Frustrating doesn’t really cut it, to say how it feels to be in or witnessing these cycles.

I was halfway through this episode and couldn’t finish the rest at the time, and was eagerly anticipating the second half because this question of how to restart the process has been on my radar for yonks.

I thought there might be some specialised trick, a hack from the convergence of neuroscience and ancient Buddhism, and it is a hack from that convergence, but it’s just the application of mindfulness ~ in particular, mindfulness of the body.

Mindfulness of the body is the first of the Four Foundations of Mindfulness, followed by mindfulness of feelings, mind and phenomena … mindfulness of kāyā, vedanā, cittā and dhammas.

The body is where bottom-up processing occurs.

Top-down processing is not embodied, and is encoded with our cache of stored memories from the past ~ when we are in top-down we are filtering stimuli through the lens of our past.

When we are embodied we are filtering stimuli only through the present.

Buddha described a causal chain: feelings and impulses (bottom-up) precede thoughts (top-down) in our experience, so we think we are making conscious decisions but our thoughts are actually just following our feelings. This causal chain has been validated by modern neuroscience. (I think this is correct, but I’ve confused myself in writing it, because Buddha also said, “Mind is the forerunner of all states.”) Korda relates the image of the monkey (mind) that thinks it is steering the elephant.

By cultivating awareness of the body, we get ahead of that causal chain and are able to see reality as it is, in the present, without interpreting stimuli through the filter of our conceptual database from the past.

In top-down we unconsciously find ourselves attracted to loving styles that were modelled in our upbringing (even if they were unhealthy) and by cultivating bottom-up processing through mindfulness of the body and feelings, we can let go of the trauma and escape this cycle of continuing to attract partners who trigger our old abandonment and attachment wounds.

If we want to become conscious, we have to go through the body.

It’s not magic, but this insight and its application is key to the work I am doing on myself and imparting to others through posts like this.

Have a listen, apply the practice, let me know what you think.

are you a people-pleaser?

Are you a people-pleaser and would like to reclaim some of the energy you often syphon off to others?

I found this article from Very Well Mind to be helpful, with tips for identifying these traits and how to move away from them if they are a problem for you.

I know for me that I’m not a chronic over-pleaser who gives and gives and gives until I’ve been sucked dry, but I do tend to be hesitant about asserting my needs, in particular for space and solitude.

These are attachment-trauma issues: I worry that if I assert these needs, the other will feel like I don’t want to spend time with them.

Truth is, that as an introvert, I cannot be fully present to share my company and enjoy theirs unless I am re-charged from any extroversion my day has demanded.

I am a much better person to be around (more available, more present, more able to listen without being distracted) once I have met my need to spend time with myself.

Refusing to meet this need in myself might only be a mild form of people-pleasing but it’s people-pleasing nonetheless and I’d like to be rid of it.

The main tips I got from the article are about setting boundaries and understanding my own goals and priorities, so I have a reference point when I’m considering the choice to sacrifice my time for another.

Let me know what you think 🤔

mental-health conditions 

Busting the myth of psychopathology using … semantics!
(The pen is a mighty tool.)
And reflections on understanding what
mental-health recovery means for me. 

An insight that is percolating in me at the moment …  

… after confirming with my therapist and the work of Gabor Maté that my condition is relatively normal and healthy (‘understandable’ is Maté’s term1) and our family dysfunction within the range of healthy …  

… and while studying and practising peer work …  

… is that “recovery” (from mental-health conditions or substance misuse or whatever) does not necessarily mean the absence of symptoms.  

👆🏼That right there is a powerful insight for me! 

The insight started with some unexpected reflection on my attachment style (disorganised) and the recognition that I don’t need assurance that my attachment with Nikki (or any significant other) is secure. In that mood I can safely practise the health-giving practice of authenticity. 

a digression about boundaries 

It is about authenticity: not needing that assurance that our survival depends on attachment.  

A disorganised attachment style is a symptom, and “recovery” doesn’t necessarily mean living symptom free but means living in harmony (in good relationship) with the manifestation of the best response we know for these unnatural circumstances2.   

An instance that illustrates this is the tussle between anxious and avoidant attachment styles (that tussle being called the disorganised attachment style): by knowing my symptoms as they manifest in certain traits and tendencies and reactive patterns, I can live with them and not worry that their occurrence means I have some problem. And without living in fear that if I’m triggered these maladaptive habits will over-run me before I can regulate. Which generally prevents me from engaging with certain important relationships because I’m anxious that I’ll fuck it up and further exacerbates symptoms.

They (the patterns) were how I adapted and they don’t need to dominate my interpretation and/or be maladaptive. I can see them for what they are, the same as when I know the types of cognitive distortions that tend to emerge when I am triggered.

I can see them as trauma responses and let them go, thereby exhausting the negative karma that caused them, reducing suffering and pointing me toward wholeness.  

These models (such as attachment styles) help develop emotional and psychological granularity and vocabulary, enabling us to imagine and articulate a more nuanced inner landscape, helping us to navigate the experience of living with and thriving from/through the mental-health conditions that are an understandable response to the culture and world we live in today.  

I like that phrase as it comes out now, and that’s where the insight really landed for me: mental-health conditions is good terminology because it clearly connotes illness but literally just means (denotes) the condition of health.  

It puts our mental condition on a health spectrum, meaning it’s just varying degrees of health we’re talking about – eliminating and preculding the very concept of psychopathology.  

I have a mental-health condition – I am in a condition of mental health.  

It doesn’t sound like much, but it means something to me right now.  

the Buddhist connection 

Reflecting on this again after another shift at work, I really do like this phrase mental-health condition, and the acceptance that I live with symptoms, because mental-health symptoms are a natural consequence of the human condition, the human condition being characterised by suffering, delusion. 

The Buddhist view puts mental health in an interesting context and on a spectrum (of illness), saying the human condition itself is a form (the ultimate form!) of mental illness. This sits nicely for me because it says all human experience is a spectrum of illness and the phrase ‘mental-health condition’ offsets this with its opposite: that all human experience is on a spectrum of health.  

The one precludes all psychopathology altogether, the other precludes the hope for health (bleak!) by precluding health altogether! And as a paradox they collapse duality and leave me with an acceptant contentment that the symptoms I live with are understandable, manageable and meaningful, I can live a happy and constructive and meaningful life in their presence.  

I do not need these symptoms to be absent for me to feel healthy.  

That’s recovery for me. 

For me (with attachment/relational trauma) much of the work of staying healthy among these symptoms involves understanding my attachment style.  

So there you have it! A solution to all the world’s mental illness in one short blog post 🤣 

I’d love to know what you think — drop me a comment or write me a DM.  

footnotes

  1. meaning, ‘a natural consequence of our toxic culture’ as well as ‘able to be comprehended’  ↩︎
  2. those circumstances being our toxic culture (Maté, 2020)  ↩︎

starting casual work as a Peer Support Worker

I am stoked to announce that I’ve been offered a casual position as a Peer Support Worker at Safe Space, a program of Neami National. I will be using my lived experience to support others experiencing acute psychological distress …

… which when I say it out loud is actually kind of daunting if I’m honest, I don’t think it really dawned on me yet that I’ll be working with some of the most distressed and dysregulated members of our community. Sharing my story, helping others to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

I love this image: a person who has travelled some way “further” down the path, turns around and sees a fellow behind, turns around, and brings their lantern to illuminate the way forward through this confounding and confronting world. That’s peer work … ancient AF.

The peer support worker is a non-clinical, advocacy-based role, where I’ll be supporting health-seekers to pursue recovery from mental illness on their terms, helping them to navigate the mental-health system and “carrying the lantern” a bit.

I’m very excited about it, because I have been gravitating toward this work as a volunteer in the last couple of years anyway, and this will be a great chance to get direct experience of working with individuals and learn how to help.

Thank you to everyone who has graced my path on this journey.

recovery is a process …

trigger warning suicidality

… not a product or a destination

I am very grateful to have had a call with my Peer Support Worker from Neami National today. I cancelled a number of appointments to clear my desk for three days of downtime during the TAFE holidays, but wanted to have this check-in, and I’m very glad I did.

She reminded me that recovery is not a thing we get to and then is over, finished, mission accomplished. It is a process, a journey, and it is important that I don’t become complacent when I am doing well. I need to remain vigilant, within reason ~ the cost-benefit scales are going to tip if I spend all the time I feel well just anticipating the next trigger and stumble.

She also helped me find some direction in navigating my path of trauma recovery, specifically. I am going to ask a Family Constellations practitioner if I can see them under Medicare on a Mental Health Care Plan. Circle of Security might also be an option, and Neami themselves ran a program of this ~ Nikki participated, and I understand there is a lot to be learned about how we can work with the attachment styles that resulted from attachment trauma, which is certainly a big factor in the constellation of things that trigger me.

When I am triggered, sometimes I get derailed from the wellness train for days at a time, and if things are going especially unwell, I can stay derailed for weeks, heavily dysregulated. It’s not okay. I can do my sadhana all I like and it does work, I am making slow but sure progress toward more-consistent wellbeing by applying myself to the modularity sadhana. But my sadhana is for the long-game and I need something more direct or immediate that’s going to help with the trauma so I don’t get so easily triggered.

After a wake-up call recently, wherein I spent a whole night feeling triggered and acutely suicidal, I am taking the process of trauma transformation seriously again ~ for one thing, I am seeing a friend who does Root Cause Therapy (RCT) at Creative Roots Breath Therapy. I never gave up the process altogether, though I have not done much Somatic Experiencing with Tracey lately. It’s definitely time to take deeper dive.

But yes, it was good to check in with my Peer Support Worker again. They provide a great (if little-known) service to the community, and if you’re curious about that, let me know. Or check out Neami here.

concentration depends on a healthy ego

After a meditation recently where I was very easily distracted, unable to concentrate for long, I started wondering about the defilements and/or the Five Hindrances, and ethics (vinaya or virtue, in Buddhism). The Five Hindrances are a traditional categorisation of obstacles to concentration ~ ultimately, obstacles to self-mastery: 

desire
aversion
sloth and torpor
restlessness
doubt

Honestly, I think itchiness should be the Sixth Hindrance! 

While the Hindrances are obstacles to concentration, we practise virtue to protect and support our concentration. The timeless example is that it’s hard to have a clear mind in the afternoon when we’ve committed murder in the morning. And we practise concentration on the present to allow insight to penetrate illusion …

👆🏽 in this sense, concentration meditation is a transpersonal practice, and therefore everything that supports concentration is a therapeutic practice ~ this might seem like an arbitrary distinction (and isn’t duality precisely what we are trying to escape!?) but it’s a helpful dichotomy for me at the moment.

During that very-distracted meditation, I thought, The mental content doesn’t seem to be about any obvious breach of ethics, so why is it that I am especially disturbed today?

Maybe it’s just that I wasn’t aware of how my conduct compromises one of the less-obvious ethical precepts, such as ‘do not extol self over others’ or the one about not harbouring ill-will. 

Maybe a distracted mind is just something a student needs to accept ~ radical acceptance of that fourth Hindrance, restlessness.

It certainly seems that access to consistently strong concentration is dependent on factors outside my control, but also I’m not sure about that. 

There must be things we can do that support concentration.

I don’t know ~ I’m trying to understand what to do with distraction in meditation, with what has been called kapicitta since Buddha’s time. Monkey mind! It’s old school.

In the concentration basket of the Eightfold Path, with right mindfulness (samma sati) we notice our mind has wandered, and with right effort (samma vayama) we bring the mind back to right concentration (samma samadhi). Over and over again, and gradually we become more content among suffering. 

I had to look up ‘defilements’ again, and read about the kleshas ~ rooted in the Three Poisons of ignorance, attachment and aversion, the defilements or afflictions are the 108 mental states that disturb the mind and result in unwholesome actions.

So yeah, I was right in my wondering, even if I was supposed to be concentrating at the time and allowing thoughts to come, dwell and fall away 👈🏼 that is the practice, the whole practice and nothing but the practice. 

And yet, I was compelled to scrounge around for a pen and scribble on the nearest piece of paper (my precepts sheet), “I am enough”, because I felt I had arrived at some insight that would continue to bug me until I made a note and allowed myself to forget the idea while I continued concentrating.

As I currently understand it, the whole practice in Zen is to concentrate on an object of meditation that keeps us from indulging the monkey mind (kapicitta), and we concentrate some more until some kind of non-cognitive insight penetrates illusion. 

Yes but there are other things, such as ethics, which support the practice of concentration. Concentration is but one aspect of the Eightfold Path ~ surely the other aspects of the Path are complementary to concentration (samadhi). 

Let’s see if I can remember the others, and see if what I’m thinking about here fits among any of those: 

  1. right concentration 
  2. right mindfulness
  3. right effort
  4. right speech
  5. right action
  6. right livelihood
  7. right view
  8. right resolve

Maybe it falls within right view (samya dristi), but I’m guessing here ~ wondering whether our perception of self is an aspect of right view. If I have an unhealthy view of self, will that compromise concentration? I think so, yes.

Because it seemed a lot of the mental content (kleshas or afflictions) were about how I could be better: more loving, more organised, more efficient, more available, less distracted all the time, more able to concentrate, and I thought, We may need to complement our (transpersonal) concentration practice with the (therapeutic) practice of treating the health of our ego. 

If we cultivate healthy ego, our ego is not always going to be popping up and saying, “Do this!” or “Do that!” when we’re already damn-well trying to do exactly what we’re supposed to be doing, which is concentrating!

This is not a new insight for me ~ it’s been percolating for a while and keeps coming up in my reflections. Reflecting on it has been helpful if only because it colours in the details of my own practice. 

And these reflections may also illuminate beyond the lines of what I feel like calling “the original Buddhism” ~ I mean, we might need to elucidate other Hindrances or nuances of the kleshas to accommodate the mental state of humans in the twenty-first century, compared with the mental state of humans when the Buddha was alive and teaching. 

As I draft this today, I have been tinkering with the various documents where I am trying to track the development and expression of these ideas in a more coherent way that I can share with others, but for now this meandering post will have to do.

I love a good meandering post. 

I am distractedly curious and passionate about understanding and applying these ideas, and helping others to do so. As I move into the mental-health sector as a peer-support worker I hope to find opportunities to do so. 

Meanwhile, I have updated the Heartwards website where I am starting to publish ideas from a transpersonal perspective about mental-health peer work. And I have opened but not worked on a hypertext project I think of more often again lately, called Whatness. I would like to add something about the Hindrances there, because processing such ideas enough to be able to express them without reference to some other source means I have integrated them enough to apply them on the fly. 

Meanwhile, if you’re reflecting on things that support concentration in meditation, I’d love to hear about in the comments. 

Legend 🤙🏼

OxyContin 👉🏽 oxytocin

OxyContin is just the 👉🏽 pointing at the 🌙 of oxytocin

I’ve been suss for a while now about the connection between oxytocin (the love and bonding hormone) and OxyContin, the trade name for oxycodone, an extraordinarily potent narcotic and opiate prescribed for chronic pain such as terminal-cancer patients suffer.

Is it or is it not a bit suss that OxyContin (a powerful and highly profitable painkiller contributing to the prescription-opioid addiction epidemic) is a very-near anagram of oxytocin!? OxyConti … an nth of difference. 

OxyCunti … I mean, could they be a bit more transparent with their marketing manipulation!?

Did they not think for a moment, “Hang on wait, people are going to clue on pretty quick that we’re literally pulling their subliminal heart strings and call us out for heinously exploitating pain for profit!”

Opiates can soothe emotional and psychological pain as well as physical pain because they replicate our endogenous opiates ~ endorphins, and oxytocin!

OxyContin replicates oxytocin 👈🏼 it’s something you can’t unsee 🤦🏼‍♂️ 

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Please reach out if this resonates with you or if you’re concerned about yourself or a loved one’s relationship with addiction, because helping others transform this is where I’m heading with Heartwards and the peer work training I’m doing.

EP re-connecting with Self to avoid being an existential suckhole

This is the EP version of this idea that if we don’t have connection with self (which is the definition and consequence of trauma), there is a tendency to seek that connection with other, either other people or other stuff, things external to the self, and wind up sucking the other dry.

Insights are emerging out of some tension that has been plaguing the family for the last week or so1, and a very valuable lesson:

when we don’t have connection with self (which is the definition and consequence of trauma) there is a tendency to seek that connection with other, either other people or other stuff, things external to the self;

knowing our needs is a function of connection with self, meaning that we meet our psychological needs by connecting with self and to connect with self we need to be meeting our needs; 

when we give to, serve, or try to help others (without connection with self), we often end up doing the opposite of giving, which is sucking, taking, draining …

We end up sucking from others when we are trying to give, or when we think we love them, because instead of giving we are taking, sucking, a natural metaphysical consequence of there being a void or vacuum where our connection with self once was ~ we become a psychological blackhole, syphoning from others what we can only truly get from connection with self.

The formal term for this is “being an existential suckhole”.

I don’t mean to sound so obtuse ~ I’m just trying to work this out. 

We reconnect with self by recovering from or releasing trauma, and through contemplative transpersonal practices (because by ‘self’ I actually mean ‘the part of us that transcends personal identification’).

How do we release trauma and integrate the parts of ourselves that we exiled during events we found traumatising? I cannot articulate that right now but it’s a central aspect of the Heartwards modularity. 

I’m sure there’s literature around this and it sounds very much like something Buddha would say (I’m thinking of the “wrong objects” here) and I am interested in seeing that documentation but for right now the insight feels real enough to not need validation. 

I drafted a lot more for this post and have hacked it back to the above so I can get something up here for the day. More to come.

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  1.  truth is it’s been plaguing us for years, generations, but this week it has come to a head again, as it does, crying to be seen ↩︎