Tag: psychospirituality

the crisis is the solution

I am very pleased to announce that I have been awarded a scholarship to complete a Cert IV in Mental Health (Peer Work)!

Round of applause! 👏🏽👏🏽👏🏽

Thank you! *bows*

I am at TAFE now, checking out the campus and enjoying the very quiet Level 3 of the library 📚🤓

I found the scholarship program a couple of months ago when I was talking to a friend about wanting to help others heal and grow and transform from mental illness. Because “a healthy world arises out of healthy minds”. My own and my family’s mental health has been patchy lately, so I’m proud of myself for making and finding and stealing the time to complete the application, network with some of the people administering the program, and land myself a scholarship!

From the course description, the Cert IV will

allow you to support people in their journey of recovery from mental illness, working in mental health services roles that support consumer peers or carer peers. Workers are employed in the mental health sector in government, public, private or community managed services.

For obvious reasons, I’m not mad-keen on the jargon in general, and in particular, the idea of referring to people as ‘consumers’. A lot of our mental-health concerns are the direct result of our consumerist society. But I’m excited about participating in the community to find ways of referring to these experiences in ways that are constructive and healthy. And I’m excited about getting involved in the lives of people who are actively working to recover through their mental-health challenges.

A lot of us are living with mental illness in a silent way, understanding that our challenges are a reflection of problems embedded in our culture, and we want to find ways of being that are more aligned with wholesome and holistic values. That’s where I would like to come in, helping others to recognise that each of our actions are what make up culture, and therefore it’s worthwhile making the effort to be the change we want to see in the world.

The scholarship was awarded by the Queensland Alliance for Mental Health (QAMH) and they have one of the shorter acronyms I have noted already in the sector. It’s going to be strange working in something called a ‘sector’, using sector jargon and trying to navigate the unwieldy institutions I have encountered already. But I’m hoping I can find a nice and chilled place to work where people understand that the symptoms of mental-illness nuances of humanity cannot be squared into a box, neatly labelled and promptly disregarded as abnormal or pathological because their presentation doesn’t match the checklist of the biopsychosocial model.

I am very much interested in representing the spiritual dimension of the holistic approach to mental-health treatment, especially since I experienced my own acute spiritual crisis in 2017. In fact, since that experience (despite a few tangents) I have been trying to find ways to help in this area, and I feel like it is now starting to come together.

When I look back even further, I remember that in my late 20s when I was moving away from my publishing career, a big part of the motivation for that shift was the desire to help make change in our society and culture in a way that was more direct than publishing alternative ideas. I loved working in publishing and I still cherish the value of literature to help move society in a more wholesome direction. However, at the time (and still now) I felt that the urgency of the need for change was such that I couldn’t rely on the ideas percolating through into action fast enough.

I had also discovered Buddhism in my mid-20s and what I saw there was already motivating me to find a way I could work in the world that leveraged and served the deep metaphysical curiosity that was goaded by my research and practice in Buddhism.

I am in my late 30s now, and a lot of the time in between has been spent travelling and/or haphazardly searching for a way of being that is alternative to the mainstream offering. On that journey I have experienced periods of debilitating depression, various manifestations of addiction and a deep sense of alienation from my self and the truth, and I believe that similar unmet curiosities are leading others into similar conditions, which is why I would like to help.

The mental-health conditions resulting from these blocked metaphysical curiosities are an opportunity to explore new territories of existence and consciousness, and it’s coming to the time when it’s no longer appropriate to just slap on a pathology label and throw away the key.

It’s time to start mixing metaphors!

It’s time to start unlocking the root causes of these conditions and to help others see how the crisis is the solution.

That’s a permaculture idea, the problem is the solution, and it applies well here to life and health, as many permaculture ideas do. I believe the epidemic of mental illness that we are experiencing as a global community is the result of a collective spiritual crisis. Since God is dead and his throne has been filled by bankers and CEOs, the rest of us are left wondering WTF is going on.

I’m reluctant to get too new-agey here, but as we move into the Age of Aquarius, one of the things changing is that we no longer need priests and gurus and other middlemen to mediate our phone calls to God. We no longer need to suffer alienation from the source of creation ~ we can take our spiritual practice and alchemical transformation into our own hands. We don’t need the approval of a church or the authority of any external source.

🤣 maybe we just need more holistic peer workers enabling individuals to step into their agency and map the path of recovery from alienation on their own terms

Here’s to that, and to new beginnings!

Becoming a peer worker means I will have the formal training and qualification to work in roles supporting those in our community who are experiencing difficulties maintaining their mental health. These are non-clinical roles, where the value is in the peer worker’s lived experience of recovery from mental illness.

I do have plans to study psychology in the future and perhaps move in to clinical and research roles, but for now it’s looking like I’ll be studying 3 days a week at TAFE Qld South Bank for the next 12 months or so.

The Cert IV requires students to complete 80 hours of work placement, and due to the skills shortage in this area it is common for work placements to become paid employment after the Cert IV is completed.

So it’s going to be an interesting part of the journey to helping others through transpersonal crises, which is my longterm goal.

As you can probably tell, I’m pretty excited about this. If you’re curious about peer work or have some experiences to share, please drop a comment below or otherwise get in touch, I would love to hear from you.

choosing my nitch: psychospiritual wellbeing

Whenever I hear an American say “niche”, I think,
NICHES GET STITCHES, BIATCH!

my kinda niche!
Photo by Sinan on Pexels.com

I’ve been thinking about my niche here at Kokoro 心 Heart, because I hear affiliate marketing requires targeting a specific audience.

I feel kind of off about marketing and sales, but that may just be the starving-artist Aussie-battler austerity mindset in me. The ideas here are intended to benefit readers, and the products I recommend here have yet more of those ideas. I’m no Tyler Durden but I’m suspicious about promoting or encouraging wanton consumerism. If anyone feels they bought something through here because I tricked them into believing their desire was a (false) need, I can at least tell myself I was transparent.

And anyway, feeling compelled to focus on writing within a certain consistent frame is going to help me … well, focus. It will create pressure to stay on point like the essay question of a uni assignment.

By focusing on the theme of psychospiritual wellbeing I will be forced to refine my thinking about this subject, and parse more of my experience through the lens of holistic transpersonal wellness.

So I’m excited about that, because when I think about the priorities informing my purpose here on Earth, the one thing that consistently comes to mind is wholeness, psychospiritual wellbeing, transpersonal awareness, the realisation of our transcendental and interconnected nature — all words for the same pursuit. I’m reluctant to use the word “enlightenment” because it’s loaded with too much connotational baggage, but understanding the true nature of reality is something I aspire to and I believe this perceptual clarity is a prerequisite for the main goal here on Earth, psychospiritual wholeness.

And I believe the psychospiritual wholeness of each individual is a prerequisite for a sustainable and harmonious future on this planet. It’s root causes of suffering I’m talking about here: we cannot be truly well (as individuals or as a global community) while our minds are mired in ignorance. That’s a Buddhist perspective I suppose, but I’m curious to know how other spiritual traditions approach the same idea.

Let me know in the comments if that’s your thing. I understand the Gnostic Christians have a thing or two to say about this.

Meanwhile yeah, my niche.

I added a static home page to describe this yesterday, and managed to wrangle the backend of WordPress to run the blog posts through a menu in the header. That was immensely satisfying, figuring out a technical aspect of publishing here. The landing page has what I would call a blurb:

At Kokoro 心 Heart I am contributing to the vision that every individual have access to the resources, knowledge, means and support to nurture their psychospiritual wellbeing and treat the root causes of suffering.

I am doing this by publishing posts about books, music, life and culture through a lens that investigates what we can learn from these about our transpersonal nature and our complex psychology.

As I do my own inner work through meditation and other spiritual modalities, I hope to develop resources and training down the track. And I’m exploring the prospects of establishing a social enterprise called Causal Connections, facilitating access to holistic psychotherapies for low-income earners.

I believe the path to a sustainable and harmonious future on this planet is paved by creating a culture of individuals who are internally sustainable and harmonious. Because individuals create culture as much, if not more, than they are influenced by culture.

We are culture, and the future is determined by the state of our present.

For now I’ll be writing about books, music, life and culture to see what I can illuminate in these about psychospiritual wellbeing. At least the first two of these will lend themselves to products I can recommend.

I panicked a bit when I remembered the importance of having a niche, because psychospiritual wellbeing is a pretty broad subject and it’s hard to think of products that sell wellness. Products that aren’t dodgy, anyway — there’s a plethora of snake-oil sales people out there trying to exploit our vulnerability to sell us answers they don’t have.

Truth is, these answers can’t be sold — anything I’ll be recommending here is just a snippet of the multi-faceted path to answers. It’s you who’ll be doing the answering — anything here is just part of the spiritual-adventure travel-guide brochure you won’t find at Lonely Planet.

Every successful AF (affiliate marketing!) blog relies on products to recommend, but Kokoro 心 Heart is not just an AF blog — it’s a work of passion, and a place for me to publish ideas about questions I’m thinking about all the time anyway.

So welcome! I hope you enjoy what I’m doing here.

Leave some comments below if you’re also thinking about these ideas. I love comments, dialogue, conversation. I’m here to build community as well, because despite my frequent overwhelming desire for escape to a cave in the Himalayas, we cannot hope to realise the true nature of our being in isolation! Be the sangha you want to see in the world!

a long-ish review-ish post about The Call by Peadar Ó Guilín

Out with the Bathwater: The psychospiritual perils of displacing a whole people along with their mythological heritage

In this reading of Peadar Ó Guilín’s The Call, I wonder
how Australian perceptions could shift to make room for truth in our history.

That said, disclaimer: I ended up writing more than expected about the parallels between The Call and the black history of Australia. It may need to be stated up front that I am as white as it comes, so I recognise the awkwardness of me speaking about the experience of First Nations people. Their experience is not my story to tell. That said, my experience of Australian culture without the inclusion of First Nations people is something I can speak about. I wish our history hadn’t gone down the way it did, and I live with a longing that our communities were informed by the wisdom of our indigenous elders.

You can download this post as a PDF if that’s how you roll.

Ó Guilín, P. (2017). The Call. David Fickling Books.*

brutal and captivating

Sometimes oppo finds end up being among the best books I’ve read. Mostly not. I was saying to a friend the other day that sourcing your books almost exclusively from op shops is a gamble. Oppo books are, come to think of it, the books that others have discarded. So Nikki and I are thinking of dropping this practice – life is just too short to spend hours over months wading through the dross in the hopes of finding a gem.

We often drop $30 or $40 at the oppo and come home with maybe fifteen books, which sit on the shelf for a long time because we know mostly they are long shots. I’m reading only fifteen or twenty books a year at the moment, so we’re accumulating a lot of books that we may never read if we do this even four or five times a year. And we have plans to live in a bus one day, so gathering books at this rate is just no longer practical.

Continue reading “a long-ish review-ish post about The Call by Peadar Ó Guilín” →

reaching out ~ what to do with a truant teen

Zane buggered off again today ~ skipped school and bailed on meeting us to drop his uniform to him. We found him, but boy has it brought up a lot of stuff!

My conditioning dictates that I should be angry, but I’m trying to be positive and bring a compassionate perspective.

This is all in the context of me trying to rediscover my place in the dynamics of the family, so I’m feeling very unsure about what my part should be in responding to this truancy again.

I’m a step-dad who has minimal-to-no relationship with Zane, and therefore limited agency for either discipline or influence. The only part I know is supporting Nikki, but she insisted I stay at the library while she drove around looking for him.

At least if I’m not there for the potential confrontation when Zane decides to show up and face the consequences of breaking our trust again, maybe I’ll have the chance to calm down a bit and play the part of compassionate supporter ~ I do want to understand why he’s making these decisions, but in which parallel universe is a 13-year-old boy going to share this with his step-dad?

In which parallel universe does a 13-year-old boy know himself why he behaves one way or another?

We need the skills of introspection and emotional intelligence to know the nuances of our internal motivations ~ skills that are not taught in our sausage-factory schools.

This gap in our education culture is a huge part of why I’m doing Kokoro 心 Heart: we need to learn how to manage our own psychospiritual wellbeing enough to stop perpetuating a culture that results in 13-year-old kids wagging class to smoke bongs down the creek. (That’s just one specific symptom of the cultural malaise I hope to address in the posts here and in the work I’m doing in the business around Kokoro 心 Heart.)

I spent my whole high-school career smoking bongs down the creek, and my decades-long drug and alcohol dependency left me in my late 20s with the emotional development of the teenager I was when I started using drugs, because I didn’t have the mentors to help me learn how to deal with my emotions any other way.

We are letting down our children and our future by allowing these gaps to remain in the upbringing of the emerging generations.

Nikki and I are doing all that we can to access services that will make up for the deficits in our own and Zane’s development.

If you’re going through or have been through this, let me know in the comments. We need all the guidance we can get, lest our son become like Trent from Punchy.

~ ~ ~

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